Surname statistics for Bell

There are approximately 116,462 people named Bell in the UK. That makes it the 56th most common surname overall. Out of every million people in the UK, approximately 1,843 are named Bell.

Frequency Comparisons
TotalRankFrequency %Per million people
Great Britain
United Kingdom (current)11646256N/A1843
United Kingdom (1881 census)56275480.1881879
Change since 1881+60187-8-0.004-36
Other Countries
United States26475267N/A981
Australia1838248N/A1124

Politics

People with the surname Bell 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 Labour.

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

  1. Labour (21)
  2. Conservative (14)
  3. Liberal Democrat (5)
  4. SNP (2)
  5. Independent (1)
  6. Durham Independent (1)
  7. Scottish Conservative & Unionist (1)
More stats for the politics nerds!

Top male forenames

David Bell
John Bell
Michael Bell
Andrew Bell
Robert Bell
Stephen Bell
James Bell
Christopher Bell
Peter Bell
Richard Bell
Alan Bell
Ian Bell
Graham Bell
Colin Bell
Paul Bell
Martin Bell
William Bell
Simon Bell
Thomas Bell
Mark Bell

Top female forenames

Susan Bell
Elizabeth Bell
Margaret Bell
Sarah Bell
Patricia Bell
Karen Bell
Jane Bell
Alison Bell
Linda Bell
Christine Bell
Janet Bell
Catherine Bell
Helen Bell
Jacqueline Bell
Mary Bell
Nicola Bell
Sandra Bell
Jennifer Bell
Deborah Bell
Angela Bell

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.