Dickens

At the 2020 census, 17,052 Americans bore the surname Dickens — 2,066th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 17,500.

By the numbers

People: 17,052
Rank: 2,066th
How common: 1 in 17,500
Per 100,000: 5.7

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

From Dicken, a medieval diminutive form of Dick + the patronymic suffix -s.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 61.3%
Black, not Hispanic 29.8%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.3%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812–1870)English novelist and social critic
Kim Dickens (born 1965)American actress
Little Jimmy Dickens (1920–2015)American musician
Catherine Dickens (1815–1879)née Hogarth, spouse of Charles Dickens
Bill Dickens (born 1958)American musician
Monica Dickens (1915–1992)British writer and novelist

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

Surnames like Dickens

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.