The history of your name

The WILLIS surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 125,627 216 0.047 466
United States (1880 census) 27,956 185 0.056 559
Change since 1880 +97671 -31 -0.009 -93
Other Countries
Australia 5,395 258 0.033 330
United Kingdom 22,652 235 0.049 493
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 WILLIS

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: England

Language of origin: English

Ethnic origin: English

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: Diminutive

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the WILLIS 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 WILLIS 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 WILLIS in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Asian/Pacific 578 0.46
White (Caucasian) 81,331 64.74
Black/African American 38,165 30.38
Mixed Race 2,224 1.77
Native American/Alaskan 1,457 1.16
White (Hispanic) 1,872 1.49

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

Meaning of WILLIS in historical publications

Willy's, the son of Willy, the "s" being added for son.

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


Similar names to WILLIS

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as WILLIS.

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 WILLIS

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