Ford

At the 2020 census, 178,559 Americans bore the surname Ford — 140th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 1,674.

By the numbers

People: 178,559
Rank: 140th
How common: 1 in 1,674
Per 100,000: 59.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Middle English

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 59.8%
Black, not Hispanic 30.7%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.8%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.6%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Ford

Henry Ford (1863–1947)American business magnate
Gerald Ford (1913–2006)president of the United States from 1974 to 1977
Harrison Ford (born 1942)American actor
John Ford (1894–1973)American film director
Betty Ford (1918–2011)First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977
Glenn Ford (1916–2006)Canadian-American actor
Tom Ford (born 1961)American fashion designer and filmmaker
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)English writer and publisher

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

Surnames like Ford

Also a first name

Ford has been given to 11,026 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2021. 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.