Michelson
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) son of Michel; (ii) son of Mikhl, the Yiddish form of Michael; (iii) son of Michel, the Dutch form of Michael (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 19 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Michelson is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 3,153 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 46Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- FIFinland1 in 63K
- CACanada≈1 in 80Kfew records
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)
- Record sources
- 306 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 6.2K (inferred from the name graph)
3,153 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Estonia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(i) son of Michel; (ii) son of Mikhl, the Yiddish form of Michael; (iii) son of Michel, the Dutch form of Michael
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname Michelson is found
(measured from records)Michelson 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 3,153 | 1 in 105K | 3.2K | Michelson | 306 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈720 est. | ≈1 in 96K | — | Michelson | 91 |
| CA Canada | ≈520 est. | ≈1 in 80K | — | Michelson | 46 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈380 est. | ≈1 in 167K | — | Michelson | 21 |
| BR Brazil | ≈340 est. | ≈1 in 626K | 230 | — | — |
| EE Estonia | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 6.2K | 122 | Michelson | 12 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 46K | — | Michelson | 8 |
| FI Finland | 88 | 1 in 63K | 88 | — | 5 |
| AG Antigua & Barbuda | ≈3 est. | ≈1 in 34K | — | Michelson | 1 |
3,153 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); the ee-stat-nimed 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 recorded senses
(measured from records)Michelson is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
patronymic from the personal name Michel, a Dutch variant of Michael.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
patronymic from the medieval personal name Michel (see Mitchell).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
patronymic from the Yiddish personal name Mikhl (see Michael).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Americanized spelling of Michelsen.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Croatian, američki fizičar, istraživanjem svjetlosti pridonio razvoju teorije relativnosti, Nobelova nagrada 1907.
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
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)- Albert Abraham Michelsonb. 1852USAmerican physicist (1852–1931)
- Harold Michelsonb. 1920USAmerican artist (1920–2007)
- Leonid Mikhelsonb. 1955RUnot in their usual nameRussian businessman
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)36 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 19 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Michelson mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) son of Michel; (ii) son of Mikhl, the Yiddish form of Michael; (iii) son of Michel, the Dutch form of Michael Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Michelson?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.2 thousand people named Michelson, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled michelson. After it come United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and Brazil; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Michelson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,153 people named Michelson in 2010, about 1 in 105 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Michelson?
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/michelsonThe 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, “Michelson” — ranked 9283rd in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.