Dobson

At the 2020 census, 18,670 Americans bore the surname Dobson — 1,886th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 16,000.

By the numbers

People: 18,670
Rank: 1,886th
How common: 1 in 16,000
Per 100,000: 6.3

Where the name comes from

Origin a patronymic

From a medieval diminutive form of the given name Robert.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 74.3%
Black, not Hispanic 16.7%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.2%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Dobson

William Dobson (1610–1646)English portrait painter
G. M. B. Dobson (1889–1976)British physicist
Fefe Dobson (born 1985)Canadian singer-songwriter
John Dobson (1915–2014)American astronomer
Kevin Dobson (1943–2020)American film and television actor
Tamara Dobson (1947–2006)American actress and model
James Dobson (1936–2025)American Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster
George Edward Dobson (1848–1895)Irish zoologist

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

Surnames like Dobson

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.