Adams

Adams is the 43rd most common surname in the United States, shared by 413,470 people at the 2020 census. That is about one person in 723.

By the numbers

People: 413,470
Rank: 43rd
How common: 1 in 723
Per 100,000: 138.3

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

Named after Charles Adams, who asked his friend Leonard Halladay to design the fly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Adams described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 71.1%
Black, not Hispanic 19.5%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.3%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.8%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Adams

John Adams (1735–1826)Founding Father, U.S. president from 1797 to 1801
John Quincy Adams (1767–1848)President of the United States from 1825 to 1829
Amy Adams (born 1974)American actress
Bryan Adams (born 1959)Canadian singer-songwriter and musician
Abigail Adams (1744–1818)First Lady of the United States from 1797 to 1801
John Couch Adams (1819–1892)English mathematician and astronomer
Ansel Adams (1902–1984)American photographer and environmentalist
Samuel Adams (1722–1803)American statesman, political philosopher, governor of Massachusetts and Founding Father of the United States

People named Adams with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Surnames like Adams

Also a first name

Adams has been given to 1,230 American babies as a first name since 1898, peaking in 1983. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.