Brooks

Brooks is the 85th most common surname in the United States, shared by 244,116 people at the 2020 census. That is about one person in 1,224.

By the numbers

People: 244,116
Rank: 85th
How common: 1 in 1,224
Per 100,000: 81.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Middle English

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 57.7%
Black, not Hispanic 32.5%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 5.0%
Hispanic or Latino 3.4%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Brooks

Mel Brooks (born 1926)American comedian, filmmaker, and actor
Garth Brooks (born 1962)American country music singer and songwriter
James L. Brooks (born 1940)American director, writer, and producer
Louise Brooks (1906–1985)American actress
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000)American writer
Fred Brooks (1931–2022)American computer scientist (1931–2022); author of The Mythical Man-Month and 'No Silver Bullet' (1986), which distinguished essential from accidental complexity in software engineering
Albert Brooks (born 1947)American actor and comedian
Richard Brooks (1912–1992)American screenwriter, film director and producer

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

Surnames like Brooks

Also a first name

Brooks has been given to 59,639 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2025. See it as a given name.

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.