Alister
given name · Latin script
Meaning: from Alcester, Warwickshire; first attested Hugo de Alencestr’ 1221 AssWo; also for MacAlaster
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈæɫɪstɝ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Alister is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GYGuyana1 in 15K(measured from records)
- UYUruguay1 in 169K
- USUnited States1 in 257K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 40 (measured from records)
- 1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
1,292 people, 2020
Highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from Alcester, Warwickshire; first attested Hugo de Alencestr’ 1221 AssWo; also for MacAlaster
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 22 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Alister counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
1,292 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INE Uruguay — Nombres más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Alister is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Hugo de Alencestr’ 1221 AssWo; Adam de Alicestr’ 1275 SRWo. From Alcester (Warwicks). Also for MACALASTER.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In gv, a male given name, equivalent to English Alexander
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Alister MacKenzieb. 1870GBScottish golf course architect (1870–1934)
- Alister Kirbyb. 1886GBBritish rower (1886-1917)
- Alister Hardyb. 1896GBBritish marine biologist (1896–1985)
- Alister McIntoshb. 1906NZNew Zealand diplomat
- Alasdair MacIntyreb. 1929GBnot in their usual nameScottish-American philosopher (1929–2025)
- Alasdair Milneb. 1930GBnot in their usual nameformer Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation
- Alasdair Grayb. 1934GBnot in their usual nameScottish writer and artist (1934–2019)
- Alister Allanb. 1944GBBritish sport shooter
- Alister Jackb. 1963GBBritish politician
- Ali Crawfordb. 1991GBnot in their usual nameScottish footballer (born 1991)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 54 sources across 31 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Alister mean, and where does it come from?
- from Alcester, Warwickshire; first attested Hugo de Alencestr’ 1221 AssWo; also for MacAlaster Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- Is Alister a male or female name?
- Alister is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What are other forms of the name Alister?
- In the etymology graph, Alejandro, Alexander and Alexandre are forms of the same name in other languages; Ally is a recorded short or pet form.
- How do you pronounce Alister?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈæɫɪstɝ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Alister have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.3 thousand people named Alister, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled alister.
- Where is Alister most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Alister is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 15 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Alister?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,292 people named Alister in 2020, about 1 in 257 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Alister?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/alisterThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Alister”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.