Whitson
surname · Latin script
Meaning: son of White or Whitt; possibly a reduced pronunciation of Whitston ‘white stone’; first attested Nicholas Witesone Ed 1 Battle (Sx)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/wɪtsən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Whitson is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 36K(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 342K
- SESweden1 in 10M
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 13 (measured from records)
- 1 in 36K (inferred from the name graph)
9,273 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
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 White or Whitt; possibly a reduced pronunciation of Whitston ‘white stone’; first attested Nicholas Witesone Ed 1 Battle (Sx)
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Where in the world(measured from records)
Whitson 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 | 9,273 | 1 in 36K | 9.3K | Whitson | 13 |
| NO Norway | 16 | 1 in 342K | 16 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 1 | 1 in 10M | 1 | — | — |
| PL Poland | — | — | — | Whitson | 5 |
| RU Russia | — | — | — | Whitson | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | 250 | Whitson | 8 |
9,273 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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Whitson 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, Obsolete form of Whitsun.
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)
- John Whitsonb. 1558English merchant and politician
- Thomas Henderson Whitsonb. 1829USAmerican farmer and Quaker minister (1829-1907)
- Edward Whitsonb. 1852USUnited States federal judge
- Sir Thomas Barnby Whitsonb. 1869GBScottish politician
- Frank Whitsonb. 1877USactor (1877-1946)
- Russell Whitsonb. 1914CACanadian politician
- Ed S. Whitson, Jr.b. 1941USAmerican politician
- Ed Whitsonb. 1955USAmerican baseball player
- Peggy Whitsonb. 1960USAmerican astronaut
- Sarah Leah Whitsonb. 2000UShuman-rights activist
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 15 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 9.3K | #3,820 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 9.2K | #3,564 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 8.8K | #3,929 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 250 | #18,468 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 16 | #47,373 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 1 | #83,418 |
| US United States | wru 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 Whitson mean, and where does it come from?
- son of White or Whitt; possibly a reduced pronunciation of Whitston ‘white stone’; first attested Nicholas Witesone Ed 1 Battle (Sx) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Whitson?
- A machine transcription gives /wɪtsən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Whitson have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 9.3 thousand people named Whitson, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled whitson.
- Where is Whitson most common?
- Whitson is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 36 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Whitson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 9,273 people named Whitson in 2010, about 1 in 36 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Whitson?
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/whitsonThe 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, “Whitson”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.