Williamson

109,310 people in America carry this name — ranked #280 of 777.

A surname with a trade, a place or a father behind it.

Say it WIHL yuhm suhn

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

W IH1 L Y AH0 M S AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 109,310 2020 Census
Rank #280 Common
Per 100,000 36.6 about 1 in 3,032 people
As a first name 303 ranked #29,280 the other way round

Where Williamson comes from and what it means

Reads literally as “the son of William”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

How to spell Williamson

Williamson is how 68% of them spell it — 160,651 people answer to the sound.

Williamson 68%
Wilkinson 32%

Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Same syllables and stress as Williamson

Nothing else in the file ends on the same sound — a rare thing, and useful if you want a first name nobody will echo.

Same rhythm — 3 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

Who carries it today

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 74.4%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 16.9%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.2%
Two or more races — 4.1%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.6%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.7%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

By sound First names that fit Williamson Which names sit well before it, and which rhyme or double up — with the reason for each.

Try it Adult Height

Open Adult Height on its own page

Where this page gets its numbers

Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers