Kelsey

At the 2020 census, 13,536 Americans bore the surname Kelsey — 2,603rd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 22,100.

By the numbers

People: 13,536
Rank: 2,603rd
How common: 1 in 22,100
Per 100,000: 4.5

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

From Old English cēol (“ship”) + siġe (“victory”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 81.0%
Black, not Hispanic 9.7%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.9%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.0%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.9%

Notable people called Kelsey

Frances Oldham Kelsey (1914–2015)Canadian-American physician and pharmacologist
Jack Kelsey (1929–1992)Welsh footballer
Fred Kelsey (1884–1961)actor, director, screenwriter

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

Surnames like Kelsey

Also a first name

Kelsey has been given to 155,738 American babies as a first name since 1891, peaking in 1992. 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.