The history of your name

The SIMPSON surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 158,241 145 0.059 587
United States (1880 census) 38,137 125 0.076 763
Change since 1880 +120104 -20 -0.017 -176
Other Countries
Australia 14,528 69 0.089 889
United Kingdom 67,287 58 0.147 1,465
Notes

'A figure of zero indicates that we don't have data for this name (usually because it's quite uncommon and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

For less common surnames, the frequency and "per million" values may be 0 even though there are people with that name. That's because they represent less than one in a million of the population, which ends up as 0 after rounding.

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the USA as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.

Classification and Origin of SIMPSON

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: From given name or forename

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the SIMPSON surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the language spoken, or religion practised, by the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Data for ethnic origin relates to the region and country in which the SIMPSON surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the ethnicity of the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Ethnic distribution of SIMPSON in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Asian/Pacific 696 0.44
White (Caucasian) 115,975 73.29
Black/African American 35,019 22.13
Mixed Race 2,658 1.68
White (Hispanic) 2,674 1.69
Native American/Alaskan 1,234 0.78

Ethnic distribution data shows the number and percentage of people with the SIMPSON surname who reported their ethnic background as being in these broad categories in the most recent national census.

Meaning of SIMPSON in historical publications

SIMPSON. 1. A Buckiniihamshire parish. 2. The son of Simon. The Simpsons of Knaresborough deduce their lineage from the time of Edward the Confessor, and from Archil, a Saxon thane, living in that reign, and in the reign of the Conqueror. Among his other )ossessions was the manor of Clint in Yorkshire, where his posterity resided in the XIII. and XIV. centuries, writing themselves De Clynt. The name of Simpson (or Simon's son) was adopted from Symou, son of William de Clynt, who was living in the year 1300. See B.L.G. However contrary to our modern notions of good taste, there are several other instances of families having disused a territorial surname in favour of a patronymical one.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.


Similar names to SIMPSON

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as SIMPSON.

This does not necessarily imply a direct relationship between the names, but may indicate names that could be mistaken for this one when written down or misheard.

Matches are generated automatically by a combination of Soundex, Metaphone and Levenshtein matching.

Potential typos for SIMPSON

The following words are slight variants of SIMPSON that are likely to be possible typos or misspellings in written material.