Dickson
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Patronymic surname from Dick; Thom Dicson is noted in Barbour’s The Brus, 1307
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/dʲɪksən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Dickson is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- NGNigeria≈1 in 3.5K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 3.9K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 4.7K
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)
- Sources
- 480 (measured from records)
- 1 in 882 (inferred from the name graph)
≈150,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
St. Vincent & Grenadines
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Patronymic surname from Dick; Thom Dicson is noted in Barbour’s The Brus, 1307.
Sources 1
- Scottish Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Dickson 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 | — | ≈150,000 est. | ≈1 in 9.5K | — | Dickson | 17 |
| NG Nigeria | #444 | ≈62,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.5K | — | Dickson | 92 |
| US United States | #668 | 35,312 | 1 in 9.4K | 35K | Dickson | 480 |
| TZ Tanzania | — | ≈26,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.3K | 1 | Dickson | 28 |
| GB United Kingdom | #450 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.7K | — | Dickson | 262 |
| GH Ghana | #252 | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 4.5K | — | Dickson | 52 |
| AU Australia | #358 | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | 1 | Dickson | 203 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | — | 115 | 1 in 882 | 115 | — | 3 |
| GD Grenada | — | 44 | 1 in 2.6K | 44 | — | 5 |
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; SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); INEC Special Gazette 2021 — 2020 parliamentary election results; Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 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)
Dickson 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, Dick’s son; first attested Thom Dicson 1307 Black (Castle Douglas)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, son of Dick
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)
- Oscar Dicksonb. 1823SESwedish explorer of the Arctic (1823–1897)
- William Kennedy Dicksonb. 1860FRScottish photographer and inventor of motion picture cameras (1860-1935)
- Leonard Eugene Dicksonb. 1874USAmerican mathematician (1874–1954)
- Violet Dicksonb. 1896English botanist, writer, and Orientalist (1896–1991)
- Gloria Dicksonb. 1917USAmerican actress (1917–1945)
- Gordon R. Dicksonb. 1923CACanadian-American science fiction writer (1923-2001)
- Kitty Dukakisb. 1936USnot in their usual nameAmerican author (1936–2025)
- Andrew Dicksonb. 1945GBBritish composer
- Barbara Dicksonb. 1947GBBritish singer and actress, recording artist
- Ngila Dicksonb. 1958NZNew Zealand costume designer
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 67 sources across 39 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 35K | #986 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 35K | #915 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 34K | #1,022 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 115 | #148 |
| GD Grenada | Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025 | 2025 | 44 | #179 |
| TZ Tanzania | INEC Special Gazette 2021 — 2020 parliamentary election results | 2020 | 1 | #12 |
Reference works 7
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Dickson mean, and where does it come from?
- Patronymic surname from Dick; Thom Dicson is noted in Barbour’s The Brus, 1307. Recorded by Scottish Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Dickson?
- A machine transcription gives /dʲɪksən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Dickson have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 147 thousand people named Dickson in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dickson.
- Where is Dickson most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Dickson is densest in St. Vincent & Grenadines — about 1 in 882 people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Dickson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 35,312 people named Dickson in 2010, about 1 in 9.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Dickson compared with other names?
- In Ghana, Dickson is the 252nd most common surname of 36,883 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dickson?
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/dicksonThe 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, “Dickson” — the 252nd most common surname in Ghana. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.