The history of your name

The WISE surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 66,738 445 0.025 247
United States (1880 census) 18,490 287 0.037 370
Change since 1880 +48248 -158 -0.012 -123
Other Countries
Australia 2,641 599 0.016 162
United Kingdom 6,858 915 0.015 149
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 WISE

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: England

Language of origin: English

Ethnic origin: English

Religious origin: Christian

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

Classification Total Percent
Native American/Alaskan 434 0.65
Asian/Pacific 334 0.5
White (Caucasian) 53,838 80.67
Black/African American 9,991 14.97
Mixed Race 1,028 1.54
White (Hispanic) 1,121 1.68

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

Meaning of WISE in historical publications


A name given for the quality of wisdom.

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


WISE. A man of judgment and Avisdom. So the Lat. Prudens, the Fr. fe Sage, &c. Among many Ze Vyses in the H.R., we have one Julia la Wyse.

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 WISE

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as WISE.

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 WISE

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