Maxwell
At the 2020 census, 65,829 Americans bore the surname Maxwell — 497th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 4,541.
By the numbers
- People
- 65,829
- Rank
- 497th
- How common
- 1 in 4,541
- Per 100,000
- 22.0
Where the name comes from
From an earlier form Mackeswell, meaning "Mack's well or spring", from Old English welle (“well”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Maxwell described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Maxwell
- James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)Scottish physicist
- Ghislaine Maxwell (born 1961)British socialite and sex trafficker, daughter of Robert Maxwell, accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein
- Lois Maxwell (1927–2007)Canadian actress
- Robert Maxwell (1923–1991)Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor and Member of Parliament
- Stella Maxwell (born 1990)British model
- Marilyn Maxwell (1921–1972)American actress and singer
- Glenn Maxwell (born 1988)Australian cricketer
- Cedric Maxwell (born 1955)American basketball player
People named Maxwell with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Maxwell
Also a first name
Maxwell has been given to 109,467 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2014. 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.