Vail

10,096 people in the United States were counted with the surname Vail in the 2020 census, making it the 3,456th most common in the country. That is about one person in 29,600.

By the numbers

People: 10,096
Rank: 3,456th
How common: 1 in 29,600
Per 100,000: 3.4

Where the name comes from

The town in Colorado was named after Vail Pass, which in turn was named after highway engineer Charles Vail. The surname likely comes from the obsolete term vail, meaning "submission", of Anglo-Norman origin.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 82.3%
Hispanic or Latino 8.0%
Black, not Hispanic 4.8%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.6%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.0%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Vail

Alfred Vail (1807–1859)American inventor
Anna Murray Vail (1863–1955)American botanist, botanical collector, librarian and editor

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

Surnames like Vail

Vaillancourt

Also a first name

Vail has been given to 547 American babies as a first name since 1915, peaking in 2018. 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.