Tait
At the 2020 census, 5,993 Americans bore the surname Tait — 5,599th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 49,900.
By the numbers
- People
- 5,993
- Rank
- 5,599th
- How common
- 1 in 49,900
- Per 100,000
- 2.0
Where the name comes from
Origin a nickname
From Middle English Tayte, Tayt, Teyt, from Middle English tayt, teyte (“cheerful, merry”), from Old Norse teitr (“cheerful, glad”), from Proto-Germanic *taitaz (“glad, delicate, tender, radiant”). Cognate with Old English tāt, Old High German zeiz.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Tait described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Tait
- Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901)Scottish mathematical physicist
- Cecilia Tait (born 1962)Peruvian volleyball player and politician
- Sarah Tait (1983–2016)Australian rower
- Flavien Tait (born 1993)French association football player
- Blyth Tait (born 1961)New Zealand equestrian
- Alice Tait (born 1986)Australian swimmer, Olympic gold medallist, world champion, former world record-holder
- Shaun Tait (born 1983)Australian cricketer
- Gerald Tait (1866–1938)Scottish sailor
People named Tait with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Tait
Also a first name
Tait has been given to 1,223 American babies as a first name since 1967, peaking in 2007. 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.