Otto
At the 2020 census, 21,938 Americans bore the surname Otto — 1,595th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 13,600.
By the numbers
- People
- 21,938
- Rank
- 1,595th
- How common
- 1 in 13,600
- Per 100,000
- 7.3
Where the name comes from
Origin Germanic languages
from Old High German, short form of compound names (such as Otachar, Ottokar) beginning with Proto-West Germanic *aud, from Proto-Germanic *audaz (“wealth, riches”) (cognate of English in Edgar, Edmund, Edward, Edith, etc.).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Otto described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Otto
- Nicolaus Otto (1832–1891)German inventor
- Frei Otto (1925–2015)German architect
- Miranda Otto (born 1967)Australian actress
- Rudolf Otto (1869–1937)German theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist
- Kristin Otto (born 1966)East German swimmer
- Jonathan Castro Otto (born 1994)Spanish footballer
- Otto, Duke of Austria (1301–1339)Duke of Austria
- Björn Otto (born 1977)German pole vaulter
People named Otto with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Otto
Also a first name
Otto has been given to 40,015 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2024. 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.