Surname statistics for West

There are approximately 61,030 people named West in the UK. That makes it the 128th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 966 are named West.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)61030128N/A966
United Kingdom (1881 census)288331120.096963
Change since 1881+32197-16+0.001+3
Other Countries
United States188464115N/A699
Australia9111127N/A557

Politics

People with the surname West are slightly less likely to be politicians than the average member of the population. When they do become politicians, they are most likely to be elected as Conservative.

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

  1. Conservative (8)
  2. Labour (7)
  3. Liberal Democrat (2)
  4. UKIP (1)
  5. Green (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

David West
John West
Paul West
Michael West
Richard West
Andrew West
Peter West
Stephen West
Christopher West
James West
Robert West
Mark West
Simon West
Alan West
Anthony West
Martin West
Ian West
Jonathan West
Philip West
Steven West

Top female forenames

Susan West
Margaret West
Julie West
Sarah West
Helen West
Gillian West
Patricia West
Nicola West
Elizabeth West
Janet West
Deborah West
Karen West
Jennifer West
Linda West
Ann West
Carol West
Joanne West
Sharon West
Emma West
Christine West

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.