Lam

59,770 people in the United States were counted with the surname Lam in the 2020 census, making it the 555th most common in the country. That is about one person in 5,001.

By the numbers

People: 59,770
Rank: 555th
How common: 1 in 5,001
Per 100,000: 20.0

Where the name comes from

Origin Cantonese

Borrowed from yue or yue.

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

Who bears the name

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

Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 87.8%
White, not Hispanic 6.2%
Hispanic or Latino 2.8%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 2.5%
Black, not Hispanic 0.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.03%

Notable people called Lam

Carrie Lam (born 1957)former Chief Executive of Hong Kong
Tô Lâm (born 1957)General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and leader of Vietnam since 2024
Wifredo Lam (1902–1982)Cuban artist
Matt Lam (born 1989)Canadian footballer
Thomas Lam (born 1993)Dutch-Finnish footballer
Ringo Lam (1955–2018)Hong Kong filmmaker
Đặng Văn Lâm (born 1993)Vietnamese association football player
Mithan Jamshed Lam (1898–1981)Indian lawyer and womens rights activist

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

Surnames like Lam

Also a first name

Lam has been given to 630 American babies as a first name since 1977, peaking in 1983. 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.