The history of your name

The WILLIAM surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 17,164 1923 0.006 64
United States (1880 census) 11,612 509 0.023 232
Change since 1880 +5552 -1414 -0.017 -168
Other Countries
Australia 119 12245 0.001 7
United Kingdom 926 5599 0.002 20
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 WILLIAM

Sorry, we don't have any origin and classification information for the WILLIAM surname.

Ethnic distribution of WILLIAM in the USA

Classification Total Percent
White (Hispanic) 402 2.34
Mixed Race 400 2.33
Asian/Pacific 276 1.61
Native American/Alaskan 115 0.67
Black/African American 10,128 59.01
White (Caucasian) 5,843 34.04

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

WILLIAM is a genuine surname, but it's an uncommon one. Did you possibly mean one of these instead?

Meaning of WILLIAM in historical publications

From the Belgic Guild-helm, harnessed with a gilded helmet; or, as others say, from Welhelm, the shield or defense of many.

Arthur, William (1857) An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman. Public Domain.


B UT WILLIAM. See Boutevilein.

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 WILLIAM

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as WILLIAM.

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 WILLIAM

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