Meredith

At the 2020 census, 23,456 Americans bore the surname Meredith — 1,481st out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 12,700.

By the numbers

People: 23,456
Rank: 1,481st
How common: 1 in 12,700
Per 100,000: 7.9

Where the name comes from

Origin Welsh, from a patronymic

From Welsh Maredudd (“great lord”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 80.6%
Black, not Hispanic 10.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.0%
Hispanic or Latino 3.2%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.2%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Meredith

Burgess Meredith (1907–1997)American actor
George Meredith (1828–1909)British novelist and poet
Billy Meredith (1874–1958)Welsh footballer
James Meredith (born 1988)Australian association football player
Ted Meredith (1891–1957)American athletics competitor
Leonard Meredith (1882–1930)English racing cyclist
James Meredith (born 1933)American political activist & writer
Louisa Anne Meredith (1812–1895)British-Australian writer and illustrator

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

Surnames like Meredith

Also a first name

Meredith has been given to 82,044 American babies as a first name since 1883, 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.