Sanderson
surname · Latin script
Meaning: son of Sander (Alexander); first attested Adam Saunderson 1349 LoPleas
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/sændɚsən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Sanderson is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 5K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 6.7K
- CACanada≈1 in 7.6K
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 460 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈110,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Dominica
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
son of Sander (Alexander); first attested Adam Saunderson 1349 LoPleas
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Where in the world(measured from records)
Sanderson 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 | — | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Sanderson | 12 |
| US United States | — | 24,384 | 1 in 14K | 24K | Sanderson | 460 |
| GB United Kingdom | #416 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 5K | 20K | Sanderson | 250 |
| CA Canada | #648 | ≈5,000 est. | ≈1 in 7.6K | — | Sanderson | 199 |
| AU Australia | #638 | ≈3,800 est. | ≈1 in 6.7K | — | Sanderson | 181 |
| GD Grenada | — | 67 | 1 in 1.7K | 67 | — | 5 |
| DM Dominica | — | 46 | 1 in 1.6K | 46 | — | 1 |
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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025; Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025. 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)
Sanderson 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, A surname originating as a patronymic.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, ‘Son of Sander’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)
- James Sandersonb. 1769GBEnglish composer and instrumentalist
- Sibyl Sandersonb. 1864USAmerican operatic soprano (1864-1903)
- Ronald Sandersonb. 1876GBBritish rower (1876–1918)
- William Sandersonb. 1944USAmerican actor
- Richard Sandersonb. 1953GBBritish singer
- Tessa Sandersonb. 1956GBBritish javelin thrower (born 1956)
- Brandon Sandersonb. 1975USAmerican fantasy writer (born 1975)
- Cael Sandersonb. 1979USAmerican wrestler
- Will Sandersonb. 1980CACanadian actor and physician
- Nikki Sandersonb. 1984GBBritish actress (born 1984)
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 41 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 24K | #1,462 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 23K | #1,384 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 23K | #1,495 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 20K | #371 |
| GD Grenada | Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025 | 2025 | 67 | #157 |
| DM Dominica | Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025 | 2025 | 46 | #181 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Sanderson mean, and where does it come from?
- son of Sander (Alexander); first attested Adam Saunderson 1349 LoPleas Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Sanderson?
- A machine transcription gives /sændɚsən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Sanderson have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 110 thousand people named Sanderson in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sanderson.
- Where is Sanderson most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sanderson is densest in Dominica — about 1 in 1.6 thousand people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Sanderson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 24,384 people named Sanderson in 2010, about 1 in 14 thousand residents.
- How common is Sanderson compared with other names?
- In the United Kingdom, Sanderson is the 416th most common surname of 1,272,424 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Sanderson?
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/sandersonThe 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, “Sanderson” — the 416th most common surname in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.