Forest

Forest is the 6,676th most common surname in the United States, shared by 4,862 people at the 2020 census. That is about one person in 61,500.

By the numbers

People: 4,862
Rank: 6,676th
How common: 1 in 61,500
Per 100,000: 1.6

Where the name comes from

French surname, from Old French forest (“forest”). Compare Laforest and Deforest.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 61.6%
Black, not Hispanic 28.7%
Hispanic or Latino 4.5%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.8%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.1%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Forest

Emmelie de Forest (born 1993)Danish singer
Lee de Forest (1873–1961)American inventor
Michael Forest (born 1929)actor
Mark Forest (1933–2022)American actor, bodybuilder and opera singer
Jean-Claude Forest (1930–1998)French comics author
Viviane Forest (born 1979)Canadian multi-sport Paralympian
Delphine Forest (1966–2020)French actress

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

Surnames like Forest

Also a first name

Forest has been given to 18,377 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2022. 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.