Dawson
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘son of Dawe’, i.e. David or of David himself; first attested Thomas Daweson 1326 Wak (Yorkshire)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/dɔːsən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Dawson is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 1.9K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 2K
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 2.4K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #990 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 541 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.9K (inferred from the name graph)
≈330,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Australia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
‘son of Dawe’, i.e. David or of David himself; first attested Thomas Daweson 1326 Wak (Yorkshire)
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Dawson 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈330,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.2K | — | Dawson | 22 |
| US United States | #329 | 83,182 | 1 in 4K | 83K | Dawson | 541 |
| GB United Kingdom | #151 | ≈34,000 est. | ≈1 in 2K | 18 | Dawson | 314 |
| AU Australia | #156 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.9K | 4 | Dawson | 221 |
| CA Canada | #248 | ≈12,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.2K | 53 | Dawson | 260 |
| NZ New Zealand | #167 | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 2.4K | — | Dawson | 133 |
| IE Ireland | #317 | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 3.1K | — | Dawson | 86 |
| IS Iceland | #477 | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 2.9K | 1 | Dawson | 8 |
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; NISRA — Baby names Northern Ireland full list (1997–present); Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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)
Dawson is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Transferred use of the surname, in origin a patronymic from Daw, a Middle English pet form of David.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, A patrilineal surname.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, An English family prominent in Cos. Monaghan and Tipperary since mid-seventeenth century. Bibl; MIF
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
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)
- William Crosby Dawsonb. 1798USAmerican politician (1798–1856)
- Ralph Dawsonb. 1897USAmerican film editor (1897-1962)
- Anthony Dawsonb. 1916GBBritish actor (1916-1992)
- Richard Dawsonb. 1932GBBritish actor (1932–2012)
- Paul Dawsonb. 1953USAmerican actor
- Roxann Dawsonb. 1958USAmerican actress and director
- Rosario Dawsonb. 1979USAmerican actress (born 1979)
- David Dawsonb. 1982GBBritish actor
- Michael Dawsonb. 1983GBEnglish association football player
- Stef Dawsonb. 2000AUAustralian actress
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)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 76 sources across 44 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 83K | #380 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 81K | #386 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 80K | #355 |
Reference works 7
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname 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
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Dawson mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘son of Dawe’, i.e. David or of David himself; first attested Thomas Daweson 1326 Wak (Yorkshire) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Dawson have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 331 thousand people named Dawson in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dawson.
- How do you pronounce Dawson?
- A machine transcription gives /dɔːsən/ (IPA) for English.
- How common is the name Dawson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 83,182 people named Dawson in 2010, about 1 in 4.0 thousand residents.
- How common is Dawson compared with other names?
- In the United Kingdom, Dawson is the 151st most common surname of 1,272,424 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dawson?
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/dawsonThe 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, “Dawson” — the 151st most common surname in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.