Thompson

surname · English · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Thompson is a surname, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 19th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: ‘son of Tom’, i.e. Thomas; first attested John Thomson 1318 Black (Carrick).

rarermore common
  • BSBahamas1 in 46◐
  • JMJamaica1 in 107
  • NZNew Zealand1 in 438

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈672K ●

across 12 countries

#179 ●

of 21M surnames

2 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
561 ●

6.6M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 500 ◐

United States

Spellings & scripts●

ThompsonLatin · English●7M records
톰프슨Hangul · Korean●0 records

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

‘son of Tom’, i.e. Thomas; first attested John Thomson 1318 Black (Carrick)

Sources 1

  • A Dictionary of English Surnames

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Thompson is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#19664,6445.5M rec.1 in 500665KThompson561
GB United Kingdom#11443,580366K rec.—3Thompson281
AU Australia#13169,044157K rec.—1Thompson292
CA Canada#12135,984131K rec.—2Thompson240
JM Jamaica#645,02813K rec.——Thompson54
IT Italy#1929,01829K rec.—listedThompson83
DE Germany#38520,61720K rec.——Thompson146
NZ New Zealand#817,22714K rec.——Thompson149
RU Russia—15,22916K rec.——Thompson55
BS Bahamas#414,7623.2K rec.——Thompson84
NG Nigeria#35414,28318K rec.——Thompson89
EG Egypt#24310,59611K rec.——Thompson31

Roughly 665K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 500). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • English7M83%
  • 377K4%
  • Spanish248K3%
  • Welsh138K2%
  • German57K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English7,040,86183%
376,6974%
Spanish247,6093%
Welsh138,3602%
German56,8071%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Thompson is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate surname399K records spelled Thompson4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy

    Also written Thomp-Son, Thom-Pson

  • Spanish surname303K records spelled Thompson4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico

    Languages: Spanish, Italian, Romanian

  • Polish surname33K records spelled Thompson28 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, Czechia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Томпсон, Tompson, Томпсън, Тхомпсон, Томпсан

  • Hindi surname33K records spelled Thompson7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala

    Also written থমপসন

80 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Thompson is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, A British surname transferred from the given name.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, ‘son of Thomas’

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

  • In English, James Robert, US politician

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In German, ['ems]. Fran­ zos. Aussprache: [em'ma].

    as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time●

02040608019001950200076 · 2018

Show as table
Thompson in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1882–2025
Yearrecords
18825
18878
18918
18945
18958
18967
18985
18996
19026
19055
19078
19095
191010
19116
191213
19138
191414
191526
191626
191717
191832
191916
192029
192119
192219
192318
192428
192519
192622
192715
192817
192921
193024
193111
193213
193318
193417
19359
193614
193717
193816
193919
194019
194122
194223
194316
194422
194518
194618
194716
194828
194923
195022
195130
195222
195314
195416
195517
195620
195719
195821
195916
196014
196118
196212
196312
196419
196516
19668
196713
196812
196912
197012
19717
197210
197315
19747
197513
197615
197711
197810
197919
198016
19815
198218
198312
198413
19856
198621
198715
198822
198933
199026
199121
199215
199332
199425
199519
199619
199726
199824
199933
200029
200123
200213
200331
200438
200529
200627
200737
200831
200932
201038
201126
201236
201333
201437
201556
201651
201755
201876
201961
202051
202161
202251
202334
202443
202559

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 128 years between 1882–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

19201940196019802000Hunter S. Thompson, b. 1937Fred Thompson, b. 1942Ken Thompson, b. 1943Mark Thompson, b. 1957Emma Thompson, b. 1959Lea Thompson, b. 1961Scottie Thompson, b. 1981Tessa Thompson, b. 1983Klay Thompson, b. 1990Jasmine Thompson, b. 2000

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence●

Attested in 75 sources across 41 countries.

Official registers attesting Thompson
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010665K#23
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000644K#19
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020640K#23
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20202.1K#6,862
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 202520251.5K#50
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—1.3K#3,638
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—1.3K#3,633
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—1.2K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—812#512
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—728#1,703
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—525#1,808
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)2022441—

Reference works 5

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 349 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Thompson?
We estimate roughly 672 thousand people bear Thompson (counting its spellings and scripts) across 12 countries in our records.
In which country does Thompson have the most bearers?
We estimate about 665 thousand people bear Thompson in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled thompson.
How common is Thompson compared with other names?
In the United States, Thompson is the 19th most common surname of 7,257,200 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Thompson mean?
Recorded meaning: ‘son of Tom’, i.e. Thomas; first attested John Thomson 1318 Black (Carrick)
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/thompson

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Thompson” — the 19th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Thompson parses inside a full name →