Wilson

At the 2020 census, 777,275 Americans bore the surname Wilson — 14th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 385.

By the numbers

People: 777,275
Rank: 14th
How common: 1 in 385
Per 100,000: 260.1

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 Wilson described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 64.5%
Black, not Hispanic 25.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.7%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 1.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.8%

Notable people called Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)president of the United States from 1913 to 1921
Harold Wilson (1916–1995)Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964-1970 and 1974-1976
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869–1959)Scottish physicist and meteorologist
Robert Wilson (born 1936)American astronomer
Owen Wilson (born 1968)American actor
Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021)American biologist, naturalist, and writer
Kenneth G. Wilson (1936–2013)Nobel prize winning US physicist
Brian Wilson (1942–2025)American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

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

Surnames like Wilson

Also a first name

Wilson has been given to 49,017 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1918. 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.