Mason, Jackson, Hudson: the boys’ names that end in son

In 2017, the last full year of American records we hold, 92,656 boys were given a first name ending in the letters s-o-n. That is one American boy in 20. Mason was seventh in the country that year, Jackson 20th, Grayson 34th, and behind them came 446 other spellings, from Hudson and Carson down to names given to five boys each.

In 1956 it was one boy in 800. So we went back through 129 years of American records and two years of British ones to find out where the -son names came from, and the answer surprised us. They are not new. They are old names that nearly died.

How we counted

A name is in if its last three letters, exactly as the official file spells it, are s-o-n. That is the whole rule. It is a rule about spelling, not about surnames, and it has two consequences you should know about. Jason counts, and Jason is nobody's surname, so we give every figure with and without it. Jensen and Macsen do not count, because they end in -sen. Boys and girls are counted from their own lists in the files, never from our own gender label. Our American series from 1880 to 2008 covers only the thousand most popular names for each sex, so every figure from it is a floor; from 1990 we also hold the full files, every name given to five or more babies, and we say which is which.

1880: Nelson, Wilson, Harrison

In 1880 one American boy in 193 had a -son name. There were 23 of them in the top 1,000 and, Jason apart, every one was a surname. Nelson was the biggest, 138th, then Wilson 179th, Harrison 190th, Jackson 247th, Anderson, Jefferson, Judson and Emerson. Further down sat names you will recognise from the other end of the list: Madison 370th, Mason 371st, Jason 386th, Addison 392nd, Carson 644th, Allison 812th and Hudson 980th. All boys. Harrison had its best year in 1888, when it was 52nd.

Then they faded, slowly, for seventy years. One boy in 311 by 1920, one in 499 by 1940, one in 708 by 1950. In 1950 only 14 -son names were left in the top 1,000 and Nelson, at 226th, was the only one inside the top 300. Mason reached 888th in 1957. Jackson hit 832nd in 1969, Carson 886th in 1971, Harrison 970th in 1977. Hudson dropped out of the top 1,000 altogether in 1920 and did not come back for 75 years. The low point for the whole group was 1956: one boy in 806.

Then Jason

Jason was 463rd in 1950. It was 260th in 1960, 47th in 1968, 13th in 1970 and third in 1973. From 1974 to 1978 it was the second most popular boys' name in America, and in 1974 it went to 3.36% of all boys born. One boy in 30, for one name. That year the -son names as a group were one boy in 28, and Jason was 94% of them.

Jason is not a surname and it is not what this article is about, so the chart below draws the boys twice, once with Jason and once without. Without it, the -son names bottomed out in 1964 at one boy in 1,030 and were still only one in 435 in 1980. What happened next is the finding.

1990 to 2017: the old surnames come back

In the 1990 full file, Jason aside, one American boy in 200 had a -son name. By 2000 it was one in 63. By 2008 one in 38, by 2010 one in 30 and by 2017 one in 21. Put Jason back in and 2017 is one boy in 20. In that year ten -son names were in the top 100: Mason seventh, Jackson 20th, Grayson 34th, Hudson 64th, Jaxson 79th, Greyson 80th, Carson 83rd, Bryson 86th, Jason 92nd and Jameson 100th.

Look at where the big ones came from. Mason was 888th in 1957 and 856th in 1960. It was 208th in 1990, 64th in 2000, 35th in 2008 and third in 2015. Jackson was 721st in 1960, 318th in 1990, 72nd in 2000, 32nd in 2008 and 17th in 2015. Carson went from 886th in 1971 to 89th in 2008. Hudson came back into the top 1,000 in 1995 at 997th and is 17th now. Harrison, 970th in 1977, is 116th. These are the names of 1880, the ones that had been sliding for seventy years, turned round inside a generation.

The arithmetic says the same. Of the 2.59% of American boys with a -son name in 2008, 2.03 points went to names that were already in the top 1,000 before 1900. Only 0.28 points went to names that first appeared after 1980: Grayson in 1984, Greyson in 1995, Jaxson and Karson in 1999, Kason in 2004, Kyson in 2008. The new spellings are loud and small. The revival is old names.

What did change is how many spellings there are. In 1990 the full file held 129 different boys' names ending in -son. In 2017 it held 449, and 51 of them went to 100 or more boys. The K spellings alone, Karson, Kason, Kayson, Kyson and Kaison, went from 118 boys in 1990 to 4,534 in 2017, the pattern we wrote about in C or K.

The girls: Allison, Madison, Addison

From 1889 to 1933, 45 years, no girls' name ending in -son made the American top 1,000 at all. A handful of girls called Ason had scraped in three times in the 1880s, and that was the lot. Alison arrived in 1934 and Allison in 1946, which happens to be the last year Allison appeared on the boys' list. Then Madison. It entered the girls' top 1,000 in 1985 at 628th, was 29th by 1995, tenth by 1997, third in 2000 and second in 2001 and 2002, one girl in 89. Addison followed in 1994 and was 11th by 2007. In 2008 one American girl in 42 had a -son name. All three of those names were boys' names in 1880, at 370th, 392nd and 812th, and Madison stayed on the boys' list until 2004.

The girls' version peaked earlier and has fallen further. In 2017 it was one girl in 68: Madison 7,847, Addison 5,593, Allison 4,017, Emerson 1,965. On the rankings since, Madison has gone from 11th in 2015 to 40th, Addison from 24th to 84th and Allison from 39th to 103rd. Only Emerson is climbing, 180th to 122nd.

Since 2015: the tide turns, except Hudson

The rankings since 2017 say the American boys have passed their peak too. In 2015 seven -son names were in the top 100. In 2025 it is four. Mason has gone from third to 39th in ten years, Jackson from 17th to 36th, Jaxson from 84th to 156th, Jason from 86th to 165th, Carson from 89th to 124th. The exception is Hudson, which has climbed in eight of the last ten years, 65th in 2015 to 17th in 2025, and is now the biggest -son name in America. Further down, Stetson went from 774th to 136th. The number of -son names in the top 1,000 has hardly moved, 39 to 38, so parents are still finding new ones: Colson, Wesson and Jettson are in, Branson, Bronson and Gibson are out.

England and Wales: one boy in 47, and Jenson

In England and Wales in 2025, 5,816 boys were given a -son name, one in 47. That is close to where America was in 2000. Three are in the top 100: Hudson 43rd with 1,204 boys, Harrison 50th with 1,007 and Mason 77th with 675. Grayson is 104th, having left the top 100 last year, then Jackson 138th and Jenson 140th.

Every -son name given to 50 or more boys in England and Wales last year is in that table. Jenson is the British one. 371 boys here, 168 in the whole of America in 2017, and it has never once been in the American top 1,000. Per head that makes it 13.5 times more British. Orson is nine times more British, and it left the American top 1,000 in 1901. Hudson and Harrison are both a little commoner here than there. Everything else runs the other way: Mason is 3.2 times more American, Jackson 4.5 times, Carson 7.7 times, Greyson 11 times, and Bryson and Jameson, 86th and 100th in America in 2017, went to 28 and 27 British boys.

Britain gives the girls almost none. 772 girls in England and Wales had a -son name in 2025, one in 328, against America's one in 68. And the biggest of them is not Madison. It is Maddison, with two d's, 324 girls to Madison's 280. In America Madison outnumbers Maddison nine to one. Addison went to 123 girls here, Allison to nine.

One year of change: -son boys fell 6% in England and Wales between 2024 and 2025 while all boys fell 1.5%. Mason went from 63rd to 77th and Grayson from 90th to 104th. Hudson and Harrison held. We would not call that a trend from one year, but it points the same way as the American rankings.

What we cannot tell you

Why. The files record what parents chose and nothing else, and we have no way of knowing whether a boy called Mason in 2017 was named after a trade, a family surname, or a name his parents liked the sound of. We do not know why the same names that slid for seventy years turned round in the 1990s. We cannot say how Britain got to one in 47, because we hold two years of British records and no British history. Our American series before 1990 stops at the thousandth name, so every early figure is a floor. And the rule is spelling: a name that ends in -son is in, and a name that ends in -sen is out, which is why Jensen's 170 British boys are not in the total.

What it means for you

If you like a -son name, the files say you are in good company in both countries and slightly less company every year. Hudson is the one going up on both sides of the Atlantic. Mason and Jackson are on the way down from very high. And if you want the one that is really British, it is Jenson, which America has never ranked at all.