Wills

At the 2020 census, 26,978 Americans bore the surname Wills — 1,277th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 11,100.

By the numbers

People: 26,978
Rank: 1,277th
How common: 1 in 11,100
Per 100,000: 9.0

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 73.3%
Black, not Hispanic 17.3%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.8%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Wills

Helen Wills (1905–1998)American tennis player
Chill Wills (1902–1978)American actor
Bob Wills (1905–1975)American musician
Beverly Wills (1933–1963)actress
William John Wills (1834–1861)British surveyor
Lucy Wills (1888–1964)British physician and hematologist
Tom Wills (1835–1880)Australian sportsman
Anneke Wills (born 1941)British actress

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

Surnames like Wills

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.