Lawton

loc · Latin script

Meaning: person from Lawton, Cheshire or Herefordshire; ‘settlement on or near a hill’

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Lawton is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • RURussia

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
423 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

person from Lawton, Cheshire or Herefordshire; ‘settlement on or near a hill’

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Lawton counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Lawton is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—14KLawton423
GB United Kingdom—listedLawton221
RU Russia——Lawton19
CA Canada——Lawton133
ES Spain—76—32
FI Finland—31—2

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; the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Lawton is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France

    Also written Law-Ton

69 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Lawton 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.

  • In English, from Lawton, Cheshire or Herefordshire; first attested Adam de Lauton’ 1205 P (Lancashire)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, 1. habitational name, common in Lancashire and Yorkshire, from Buglawton or Church Lawton in Cheshire, or Lawton in Herefordshire, named in Old English as ‘settlement on or near a hill’, or ‘settlement by a burial mound’, from hldw ‘hill’, ‘burial mound’ -i- tun ‘enclosure’, ‘settlement’. 2. variant spelling of Laughton.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, Yorks., from Buglawton or Church Lawton in Ches., so called from OE hlaw hill, burial mound (see Law 2) + tun enclosure, settlement. Lawty 1. English: nickname for a trustworthy person, from ME lawty loyalty (OF leaute, L legalitas, a deriv. of legaits; see Leal). 2. Scots: var. of Latto. Vars. (of 1): Laity, Lewt(e)y, L(e)uty. Patr. (from a dim.): Pol.: Laskiewicz, Laszkiewicz.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In English, A placename:

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Irish, A well-known English name used in Co. Cork as an anglicized form of Ó Lachtnáin. See Loughnane

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

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)

18001850190019502000Henry Ware Lawton, b. 1843Punch Broadbent, b. 1892Joseph Lawton Collins, b. 1896Frank Lawton, b. 1904Tommy Lawton, b. 1919Lawton Chiles, b. 1930John H. Lawton, b. 1943J. F. Lawton, b. 1960Larry Lawton, b. 1961Denyce Lawton, b. 1978

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 36 sources across 20 countries.

Official registers attesting Lawton
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201014K#2,630
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200013K#2,488
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202013K#2,749
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—76#33,627
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—76#33,284
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—31#33,933
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • 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 Lawton mean, and where does it come from?
person from Lawton, Cheshire or Herefordshire; ‘settlement on or near a hill’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Lawton have the most bearers?
Lawton is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled lawton.

What do you want to know about Lawton?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/lawton

The 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, “Lawton”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Lawton parses inside a full name →