Humanverse

Clayton

At the 2020 census, 53,875 Americans bore the surname Clayton — 611th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 5,548.

By the numbers

People
53,875
Rank
611th
How common
1 in 5,548
Per 100,000
18.0

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Middle English Claytone, Cleyton, from Old English clǣġ (“clay”) + Old English tūn (“enclosure, settlement; town”). Analyzable as.

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

Who bears the name

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

Notable people called Clayton

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

Surnames like Clayton

Also a first name

Clayton has been given to 139,954 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2000. 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.