The history of your name

The MCPHERSON surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 34,763 913 0.013 129
United States (1880 census) 69 40345 0 1
Change since 1880 +34694 +39432 +N/A +128
Other Countries
Australia 4,492 326 0.027 275
United Kingdom 6,316 1000 0.014 138
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 MCPHERSON

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: From name of parent

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

Classification Total Percent
Mixed Race 591 1.7
White (Hispanic) 497 1.43
Native American/Alaskan 233 0.67
Asian/Pacific 149 0.43
White (Caucasian) 26,733 76.9
Black/African American 6,563 18.88

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

Meaning of MCPHERSON in historical publications

The son of Pherson. Pherson is the son of Pfarrer, German, a parson, and that from Pfarre, a parish, a benefit, or living. Pfarre is derived from the Gaelic Faire, a watcher, to watch, an overseer, Episcopus.

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


Similar names to MCPHERSON

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as MCPHERSON.

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 MCPHERSON

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