Sun

At the 2020 census, 36,735 Americans bore the surname Sun — 929th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 8,137.

By the numbers

People: 36,735
Rank: 929th
How common: 1 in 8,137
Per 100,000: 12.3

Where the name comes from

From cmn, Wade-Giles romanization: Sun¹.

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

Who bears the name

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

Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 93.6%
White, not Hispanic 3.2%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 1.7%
Hispanic or Latino 0.9%
Black, not Hispanic 0.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.2%

Notable people called Sun

Sun Tzu (543 BC–469 BC)6th century BCE Chinese general and military strategist
Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925)Chinese politician, physician, and revolutionary
Sun Quan (182–252)Emperor of Eastern Wu during the Three Kingdoms period
Sun Yang (born 1991)Chinese swimmer
Stefanie Sun (born 1978)Singaporean singer
Sun Jihai (born 1977)Chinese footballer
Sun Wen (born 1973)Chinese footballer
Sun Chunlan (born 1950)Chinese politician

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

Surnames like Sun

Also a first name

Sun has been given to 1,007 American babies as a first name since 1902, 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.