Willis

125,122 people in America carry this name — ranked #242 of 777.

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

Say it WIH lihs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

W IH1 L IH0 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 125,122 2020 Census
Rank #242 Common
Per 100,000 41.9 about 1 in 2,649 people
As a first name 17,367 ranked #1,744 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Willis

Reads literally as “willy's, the son of Willy, the " s" being added for son”.

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 Willis is spelled

Willis is how 91% of them spell it — 137,159 people answer to the sound.

Willis 91%
Will 8.8%

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.

Who answers to it now

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 59.6%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 30.3%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.3%
Two or more races — 5.0%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.2%

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.

The most common full names

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

By sound First names that fit Willis 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