About Dawson
Dawson is an English surname meaning “son of David.” Its modern first-name history has been strongly shaped by fiction, especially Dawson’s Creek and Nicholas Sparks’s The Best of Me. American use rose sharply in the late 1990s, and the name has remained much more common than it was before that rise.
Meaning and origin
Dawson belongs to the group of English surnames built from a father’s given name. Its first part comes from Daw, a familiar form of David, followed by son. Davidson expresses the same relationship with the full name preserved.
David goes back to Hebrew Dawid and is traditionally interpreted as “beloved.” Dawson’s direct surname meaning is “son of David”; the older Hebrew meaning belongs to David itself.
The surname later moved into use as a first name. That history explains its structure without requiring a place called Dawson as its origin, even though the same surname also appears in geographical names.
Pronunciation
Dawson is pronounced DAW-sun, with two syllables and stress on the first. The final syllable is unstressed. Its sound stays close to the two written parts, while the vowel in Daw varies somewhat with accent.
Dawson’s Creek
The television drama Dawson’s Creek ran from 1998 to 2003. Its central character helped bring Dawson into much wider first-name use at the end of the twentieth century.
The series follows four teenagers growing up in a small coastal town in Massachusetts. Its coming-of-age setting gave the name an association with adolescence and friendship at the moment American birth figures were changing dramatically.
There were 209 boys named Dawson in 1997. The number rose to 1,895 in 1998 and 2,802 in 1999. Those figures show the scale and timing of the change more clearly than a general description of the name as fashionable.
Dawson Cole in The Best of Me
Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Best of Me centers on Dawson Cole and Amanda Collier. They fall in love as high-school students in North Carolina, but their lives take different paths.
Twenty-five years later, they return home for the funeral of Tuck Hostetler, who had supported their youthful relationship. The instructions he leaves bring them together again and force them to reconsider their past.
The film adaptation also reunites Dawson and Amanda, but uses a twenty-year separation. Both versions give Dawson a romantic fictional connection beyond the earlier television series.
Popularity in the United States
Dawson’s male peak remains 1999, when it ranked No. 136. In 2025, it stood at No. 143 with 2,487 boys, much closer to that peak than to its pre-television totals.
The spelling also appears for girls. In 2025, 81 girls received Dawson, at No. 2,260. Boys account for the large majority of recent American use.
Sources & methodologyReferences, data & attribution
Meaning and history draw on the references below. Popularity figures use the local Social Security Administration series for this exact spelling and sex; counts below five are omitted. Existing Wiktionary material is available under CC BY-SA. Suggested shortenings are identified in the prose.
How popular is Dawson?
In 2025, Dawson ranked #143 among boys in the United States, with 2,487 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for boys in 1885; its largest annual count was 2,802 in 1999. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.