Wilson

777,275 people in America carry this name — ranked #14 of 777.

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

Say it WIHL suhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

People counted 777,275 2020 Census
Per 100,000 260.0 about 1 in 426 people

What Wilson means and where it comes from

Reads literally as “son of Willuun”.
A name taken from a father’s name.

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.

Spellings of Wilson

Wilson is how 98% of them spell it — 789,165 people answer to the sound.

Wilson 98%
William 1.5%

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.

Surnames built the same way as Wilson

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 — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

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

Who answers to it now

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 64.5%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 25.5%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.6%
Two or more races — 4.7%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.0%

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.

Try it How Rare Is It?

Where this name sits between household and almost unheard of.

Familiar

People counted39,895
Rank#1,052
Roughly1 in 8,308 people

Open the full entry

Open How Rare Is It? 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