This article is about short last names beginning with T that are under five letters.
We look at the most common four-letter, three-letter, and two-letter T surnames in America in recent years.
We also investigate whether anybody in the United States is named simply “T”.
Using The 2010 U.S. Census
We used the 2010 U.S. Census to look at the numbers for these names.
That allowed us to grab the top ten in each category of four, three, and two-letter names.
The 2010 census also gives a breakdown of how people reported their ethnicity. Some of these names have at least tiny percentages of all the possible ethnic categories.
We’ve included the top two ethnicities in the tables below when the second is above 20%. The first listed ethnicity has the higher percentage.
By the way, the initials PI stand for “Pacific Islander”.
Most Common Four Letter Last Names Starting With T
Tran is the most common four-letter surname starting with T in America.
There were over 188 thousand people named Tran in the USA in 2010.
| Last Name | Number | Mostly |
| Tang | 34,961 | Asian & PI |
| Tate | 71,058 | White, Black |
| Thai | 11,644 | Asian & PI |
| Thao | 23,404 | Asian & PI |
| Todd | 71,759 | White |
| Tong | 13,196 | Asian & PI |
| Toro | 10,650 | Hispanic |
| Toth | 19,606 | White |
| Tran | 188,498 | Asian & PI |
| Tsai | 10,968 | Asian & PI |
96% of people named Tran ticked the box for “Asian & Pacific Islander” in the 2010 census. The name is often Vietnamese in origin.
Todd and Tate have very similar numbers at just over seventy-one thousand bearers in the census.
81% of people named Todd identified as white, with 14% declaring as black.
The English origins of Todd come from the old word for a fox (todde). Early bearers may have had red hair or perhaps were considered to be cunning.
There was more of an even spread for the name of Tate.
- White: 56%
- Black: 38%
Most Common Three Letter Last Names Starting With T
You can see in the table below that three-letter last names starting with T are generally less common than in the previous section.
| Last Name | Number | Mostly |
| Tai | 4,401 | Asian & PI |
| Tam | 13,327 | Asian & PI |
| Tan | 32,120 | Asian & PI |
| Tao | 4,286 | Asian & PI |
| Tew | 5,247 | White |
| Tom | 10,350 | Asian & PI |
| Ton | 4,667 | Asian & PI |
| Toy | 5,784 | White, Asian & PI |
| Tse | 6,227 | Asian & PI |
| Tye | 3,746 | White, Black |
Tan is the most common three-letter surname starting with T in the United States. It had just over thirty-two thousand bearers in 2010.
A majority of 92% of holders reported as Asian or Pacific Islander in the census. The name is usually of Chinese origins.
The next most common name in this section has less than half the numbers. Tam was 90% Asian or Pacific Islander. The name is also of Chinese origins.
Tom is the name here that is most spread across heritages:
- Asian & PI: 53%
- White: 19%
- American Indian: 17%
- Hispanic: 3%
This is one of the few short names I’ve seen across the alphabet with significant Native American heritage from the census.
Sam is another example (check out the index to other letters at the end of this article).
Two Letter Last Names Starting With T
I can’t give you the top ten two-letter names starting with T.
That’s because there are only a total of six examples in the 2010 U.S. census.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few more two-letter T family names in America. It’s just that other names didn’t have at least one hundred bearers in 2010.
The U.S. National Archives only publishes details of surnames with one hundred or more bearers. Here is a summary of the six names from the census:
| Last Name | Number | Mostly |
| Ta | 8,017 | Asian & PI |
| Te | 1,246 | Asian & PI |
| Ti | 245 | Asian & PI |
| To | 8,934 | Asian & PI |
| Tu | 9,230 | Asian & PI |
| Ty | 955 | Asian & PI |
Tu is the most common two-letter name starting with T in the United States. The name has Chinese origins.
All these names have a high percentage of people declaring as Asian or Pacific Islander in the census.
The name with the widest spread of heritages was Ti:
- Asian & PI: 72%
- White: 16%
- Hispanic: 8%
- Black: 2%
T As A One-Letter Last Name
Statistics for the name “T” aren’t in the published U.S. census of 2010. That means that even if it exists in the country, there weren’t one hundred people with the name.
Could there be a few families with “T” as their name in the United States?
The late mathematician A. Ross Eckler conducted a study of one-letter names in the 1970s using telephone directories.
You may be too young to remember telephone directories stacked on the hall table. Here’s a picture:
The entries were formatted as lists under the name.
Eckler pointed out that many examples in the books were errors that came from reversing initials and last names.
He found these two entries under T:
- Erron
- H Messall
Could these be typographic errors for someone with an initial T?
For example, could “H Messall T” really be “T H Messall”?
I think so. My guess is that both these names are errors.
Other Surnames That Start With T
If you want to look at more names, check out these articles:
