Chester

At the 2020 census, 13,798 Americans bore the surname Chester — 2,555th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 21,700.

By the numbers

People: 13,798
Rank: 2,555th
How common: 1 in 21,700
Per 100,000: 4.6

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Middle English Chestre, from Old English Ċeaster, from ċeaster (“a town or city, especially a Roman one”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 63.4%
Black, not Hispanic 27.2%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.2%
Hispanic or Latino 3.1%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 1.3%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.8%

Notable people called Chester

James Chester (born 1989)association football player
Vanessa Lee Chester (born 1984)American actress
Craig Chester (born 1965)American actor and screenwriter

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

Surnames like Chester

Also a first name

Chester has been given to 122,302 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1920. 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.