Ramsey

At the 2020 census, 74,666 Americans bore the surname Ramsey — 434th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 4,003.

By the numbers

People: 74,666
Rank: 434th
How common: 1 in 4,003
Per 100,000: 25.0

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Old English hramsa (“wild garlic”) + īeġ (“island”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 75.0%
Black, not Hispanic 15.9%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.4%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.6%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Ramsey

Aaron Ramsey (born 1990)Welsh association football player
Norman Foster Ramsey (1915–2011)American physicist
Alf Ramsey (1920–1999)English association football player and manager
Bella Ramsey (born 2003)British actor
Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930)British mathematician, philosopher, and economist
Anne Ramsey (1929–1988)American actress
David Ramsey (born 1971)American actor
Laura Ramsey (born 1982)American actress

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

Surnames like Ramsey

Also a first name

Ramsey has been given to 8,861 American babies as a first name since 1894, peaking in 2017. 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.