Acton

At the 2020 census, 4,617 Americans bore the surname Acton — 7,013th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 64,700.

By the numbers

People: 4,617
Rank: 7,013th
How common: 1 in 64,700
Per 100,000: 1.5

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Old English āc (“oak”) + tūn (“farm, town, homestead”); compare the doublet.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Acton described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 90.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.2%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.2%
Black, not Hispanic 1.6%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.8%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Acton

Eliza Acton (1799–1859)British food writer and poet
Loren Acton (born 1936)astronaut
Brian Acton (born 1972)American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur, co-founder of WhatsApp
Harold Acton (1904–1994)British writer and scholar
Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet (1736–1811)prime minister of Naples
Charles Januarius Acton (1803–1847)Catholic cardinal

People named Acton with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.