 The village name is also applied to a larger electoral ward, whose population at the 2011 Census was 4,842.The Welsh word "ponc", plural "ponciau", means "bank" or "hillock", and the village probably takes its name from the large number of spoil tips which formerly covered the area.The village name was spelt using the form "Ponkey" until 1932, when the villagers convened a meeting to petition for its change to "Ponciau", feeling the earlier spelling to be ugly in addition to inaccurately representing Welsh language phonetics.