Pinkerton

At the 2020 census, 7,912 Americans bore the surname Pinkerton — 4,339th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 37,800.

By the numbers

People: 7,912
Rank: 4,339th
How common: 1 in 37,800
Per 100,000: 2.7

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

Habitational surname from a place near Dunbar, from an unexplained first element + Old English tūn (“enclosure”). This surname is well established in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 87.8%
Black, not Hispanic 3.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.6%
Hispanic or Latino 3.4%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Pinkerton

Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884)Scottish-American civil war detective and spy

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

Surnames like Pinkerton

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.