Donner

At the 2020 census, 4,716 Americans bore the surname Donner — 6,866th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 63,400.

By the numbers

People: 4,716
Rank: 6,866th
How common: 1 in 63,400
Per 100,000: 1.6

Where the name comes from

First attested in the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. Named from Dutch donder (“thunder”), and perhaps influenced by the German form Donner.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 85.3%
Black, not Hispanic 5.9%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.3%
Hispanic or Latino 3.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Donner

Richard Donner (1930–2021)American film director
Jörn Donner (1933–2020)Finland Swedish writer, filmmaker and politician
Lauren Shuler Donner (born 1949)American film producer
Clive Donner (1926–2010)British film director
Franziska Donner (1900–1992)first lady of South Korea
Georg Rafael Donner (1693–1741)Austrian sculptor
Robert Donner (1931–2006)American actor
Johannes Hendrikus Donner (1927–1988)Dutch chess grandmaster

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

Surnames like Donner

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.