Wales
At the 2020 census, 4,789 Americans bore the surname Wales — 6,770th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 62,400.
By the numbers
- People
- 4,789
- Rank
- 6,770th
- How common
- 1 in 62,400
- Per 100,000
- 1.6
Where the name comes from
From Middle English Wales, from Old English Wēalas, plural of wealh (“Celt, Welsh person”), from Proto-West Germanic *walh, from Proto-Germanic *walhaz (“Celt, Roman”). Compare the second element in Cornwall, and also Gaul.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Wales described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Wales
- Jimmy Wales (born 1966)co-founder of Wikipedia
- Catherine, Princess of Wales (born 1982)member of the British Royal Family and princess of Wales since 2022
- Prince George of Wales (born 2013)British prince; eldest child of William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales
- Princess Charlotte of Wales (born 2015)daughter of William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales
- Prince Louis of Wales (born 2018)youngest child of William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales
- Maud of Wales (1869–1938)British princess (1869-1938), Queen consort of Norway from 1905 to 1938
- Ethel Wales (1878–1952)actress
- Lachlan Wales (born 1997)Australian association football player
People named Wales with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Wales
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.