Surname statistics for English

There are approximately 13,744 people named English in the UK. That makes it the 741th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 218 are named English.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)13744741N/A218
United Kingdom (1881 census)56317910.019188
Change since 1881+8113+50+0.003+30
Other Countries
United States45032692N/A167
Australia2784565N/A170

Politics

People with the surname English are slightly more likely to be politicians than the average member of the population. When they do become politicians, they are most likely to be elected as Liberal Democrat.

As of the most recent set of elections, the political parties represented by politicians called English are:

  1. Liberal Democrat (4)
  2. Conservative (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

John English
David English
Michael English
Mark English
Paul English
Robert English
Richard English
Brian English
James English
Christopher English
Peter English
Stephen English
Andrew English
William English
Simon English
Alan English
Martin English
Steven English
Thomas English
Colin English

Top female forenames

Karen English
Patricia English
Elizabeth English
Linda English
Jennifer English
Christine English
Margaret English
Heather English
REbecca English
Helen English
Jane English
Louise English
Carol English
Ann English
Susan English
Janet English
Alison English
Caroline English
Stella English
Sarah English

Notes

  • Total is the total number of people with that surname.
  • Rank is the position in the list of names ordered by total (eg, a rank of 1 means that it's the most common name, and a rank of 10 means it's the tenth most common, etc).
  • Frequency is the percentage of people with that surname.
  • Per million people is the number of people with that surname per million of the population.

All of these are approximate figures, and the current figures especially so. The 1881 census figures are correct for what was recorded on the census, but we don't really know how accurate it was. At least, though the 1881 figures won't change, as it's a snapshot of a point in time. The current figures, by contrast, are variable according to births, deaths, migration and marriages, so the values shown here are only a best approximation to whatever was the case when the underlying data was collated and will not be the same as whatever the values are right now.

'N/A' indicates that we don't have data for this name in that country or time (usually because it's quite uncommon there and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one there with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the UK as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.