Sylvester

At the 2020 census, 18,019 Americans bore the surname Sylvester — 1,952nd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 16,600.

By the numbers

People: 18,019
Rank: 1,952nd
How common: 1 in 16,600
Per 100,000: 6.0

Where the name comes from

Borrowed from Latin sylvester (“woody, rural”) from silva (“wood”); name of a saint whose feast day falls on December 31.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 69.2%
Black, not Hispanic 20.9%
Hispanic or Latino 4.0%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.2%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.8%

Notable people called Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897)English mathematician
Sylvester (1947–1988)American singer-songwriter
William Sylvester (1922–1995)American film actor
Mike Sylvester (born 1951)American-Italian basketball player and coach

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

Surnames like Sylvester

Sylvia

Also a first name

Sylvester has been given to 43,857 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1920. 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.