Alston

surname · Latin script

Meaning: A place in England:

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Alston is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • NZNew Zealand≈1 in 3.3K(inferred from the name graph)
  • JMJamaica≈1 in 4.6K
  • SGSingapore≈1 in 8.5K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

30,693 people, 2010

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
458 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 2.8K (inferred from the name graph)

Åland Islands, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

AlstonLatin(measured from records)
อัลส์ตั้นThai(measured from records)

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

A place in England:

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Where in the world(measured from records)

Alston 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.

Where Alston is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#85430,6931 in 11K31KAlston458
GB United Kingdom—≈6,600 est.≈1 in 9.9KlistedAlston167
GH Ghana#452≈4,900 est.≈1 in 5.9K—Alston9
ZA South Africa—≈3,000 est.≈1 in 19K—Alston26
CA Canada—≈1,700 est.≈1 in 22K—Alston90
NZ New Zealand#341≈1,500 est.≈1 in 3.3K—Alston23
SG Singapore#649≈730 est.≈1 in 8.5K—Alston27
JM Jamaica#136≈610 est.≈1 in 4.6K—Alston4
AX Åland Islands#335≈9 est.≈1 in 2.8K—Alston1

30,693 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register. 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Alston is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Polish surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, United Kingdom, Bulgaria

    Languages: Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian

    Also written Алстон

  • Russian surname11 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian

    Also written Алстон, Olston, Allston, Олстан, Олстон

50 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Alston is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Old English; from the old place

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

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)

16001700180019002000Charles Alston, b. 1685Willis Alston, b. 1769Charles Alston, b. 1907Walter Alston, b. 1911William Alston, b. 1921Adrian Alston, b. 1949Derrick Alston, b. 1972Rafer Alston, b. 1976Daniel Alston, b. 1985Shizz Alston, b. 1996

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 33 sources across 23 countries.

Official registers attesting Alston
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201031K#1,148
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202029K#1,203
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200028K#1,140
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 3

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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 Alston mean, and where does it come from?
A place in England: Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
In which country does Alston have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 31 thousand people named Alston, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled alston.
How common is the name Alston?
In the United States, the national register counted 30,693 people named Alston in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
How common is Alston compared with other names?
In the United States, Alston is the 854th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Alston?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/alston

The 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, “Alston” — the 854th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Alston parses inside a full name →