Wallace

At the 2020 census, 189,325 Americans bore the surname Wallace — 128th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 1,579.

By the numbers

People: 189,325
Rank: 128th
How common: 1 in 1,579
Per 100,000: 63.3

Where the name comes from

Origin a nickname

An Old English byname for a Welshman or Breton, from Anglo-Norman waleis (“foreign”); see wǣlisċ.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 66.5%
Black, not Hispanic 24.0%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.5%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist
William Wallace (1270–1305)Scottish knight and leading figure in the First War of Scottish Independence
Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965)American politician (1888–1965); Vice President of the United States from 1941 to 1945
Edgar Wallace (1875–1932)British crime writer, journalist and playwright
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)American fiction writer and essayist
Lew Wallace (1827–1905)American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, territorial governor and statesman, politician, and author of 'Ben Hur'
George Wallace (1919–1998)45th Governor of Alabama
Marcia Wallace Peams (1942–2013)American actress and comedian

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

Surnames like Wallace

Also a first name

Wallace has been given to 83,851 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1923. 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.