Lesley

At the 2020 census, 2,733 Americans bore the surname Lesley — 11,085th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 109,000.

By the numbers

People: 2,733
Rank: 11,085th
How common: 1 in 109,000
Per 100,000: 0.91

Where the name comes from

From a placename in Aberdeenshire, originally Lesslyn, Scottish Gaelic lios cuileann (“garden of hollies”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 74.0%
Black, not Hispanic 15.9%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 5.3%
Hispanic or Latino 2.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 1.3%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%

Surnames like Lesley

Also a first name

Lesley has been given to 39,098 American babies as a first name since 1882, peaking in 1980. 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.