Petersen

At the 2020 census, 58,885 Americans bore the surname Petersen — 563rd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 5,076.

By the numbers

People: 58,885
Rank: 563rd
How common: 1 in 5,076
Per 100,000: 19.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Danish

From Danish Petersen or less often, from Norwegian Petersen.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 90.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.1%
Black, not Hispanic 1.6%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Petersen

Carl Wilhelm Petersén (1884–1973)Olympic curler

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

Surnames like Petersen

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.