Leon
At the 2020 census, 85,611 Americans bore the surname Leon — 362nd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 3,491.
By the numbers
- People
- 85,611
- Rank
- 362nd
- How common
- 1 in 3,491
- Per 100,000
- 28.6
Where the name comes from
Origin Latin
Ultimately from Latin Leo and leo (“lion”), from Ancient Greek Λέων and λέων (“lion”), likely ultimately from a non-Indo-European language. Sometimes via other related languages such as French Léon and sometimes as a diminutive of related names such as Leonard and Leonardo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Leon described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Leon
- Juan Ponce de León (1460–1521)Spanish explorer and conquistador
- Alfonso XI of Castile and Leon (1311–1350)King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1312 to 1350
- Bernardo Arévalo de León (born 1958)President of Guatemala since 2024
- Luis de León (1527–1591)Spanish poet and Augustinian friar
- Donna Leon (born 1942)American crime novelist
- Mapi León (born 1995)Spanish association football player
- Pedro León (born 1986)Spanish footballer
- Wilfredo Leon (born 1993)Cuban-Polish volleyball player
People named Leon with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Leon
Also a first name
Leon has been given to 184,074 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1924. 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.