Humanverse

Anderson

756,560 people in the United States were counted with the surname Anderson in the 2020 census, making it the 15th most common in the country. That is about one person in 395.

By the numbers

People
756,560
Rank
15th
How common
1 in 395
Per 100,000
253.1

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

From after Saint Andrew, patron saint of Scotland. In the United States, sometimes an anglicization of Danish and Norwegian Andersen or Swedish Andersson.

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

Who bears the name

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

Notable people called Anderson

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

Surnames like Anderson

Also a first name

Anderson has been given to 35,646 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2012. 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.