Colson
- Pronunciation
- [Col-son]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Variant Of Nicholas People's Victory.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Colson
Colson descends from the Old English patronymic surname meaning "son of Coll" — Coll being a medieval English short form of Nicholas (see separate entry on Nicholas for the Greek Nikolaos etymology meaning "victory of the people"). The Colson surname has been used continuously since the medieval period.
The name's overwhelming modern American cultural anchor is American novelist Colson Whitehead (using Whitehead as a surname, born 1969, the iconic African-American novelist whose works including The Underground Railroad 2016 and The Nickel Boys 2019 made him one of the foundational figures of 21st-century American literary fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and 2020 — making him one of only four authors to win two Pulitzers).
Notable other bearers include American basketball player Colson Yankoff; the contemporary fictional Colson of various contemporary novels; and various contemporary American social media influencers. The name's transition from surname to American first name accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s, riding the broader American taste for surname-style first names with the popular -son ending alongside Carson, Mason, and Jackson. Colson's American climb is recent: the name climbed from outside the US top 1000 in 2010 to the US top 300 boys' rank by 2018 and the top 300 since. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the surname-style sophistication, the in-built Nicholas-classical religious anchor, and the popular two-syllable -son ending family. Two firm syllables, soft consonants, and tonal versatility from rural-American to upwardly-mobile-American. The name reads as both classical-Anglo-Saxon and contemporary American with the strong Colson Whitehead American literary cultural anchor. Common nicknames Cole (the dominant short form, casual and warm — also a popular standalone name on its own), Col, Sonny, and the rare Colsie each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Colson and Coleson have their own SSA tracking. International forms include the broader Nicholas/Nikolaos family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Colson
US Popularity History (2017–2025)
Annual US births named Colson by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2025 with 1,099 boys named Colson (boy rank #311 that year).
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
Paste the snippet below on any HTML page. Includes a credit link back to 9BabyNames — please keep it intact.
Where in the US Is Colson Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Colson the strongest states are West Virginia, Montana, Maine.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | West Virginia | #135 | 136 |
| 2 | Montana | #194 | 19 |
| 3 | Maine | #198 | 27 |
| 4 | New Hampshire | #208 | 19 |
| 5 | South Dakota | #209 | 27 |
| 6 | Ohio | #257 | 541 |
| 7 | Kentucky | #267 | 226 |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | #272 | 469 |
| 9 | South Carolina | #277 | 140 |
| 10 | Indiana | #297 | 342 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | #842 | 143 |
| 2 | Arizona | #717 | 63 |
| 3 | New York | #605 | 187 |
| 4 | Florida | #599 | 270 |
| 5 | Washington | #587 | 103 |
| 6 | New Jersey | #581 | 73 |
| 7 | Massachusetts | #568 | 55 |
| 8 | Texas | #546 | 349 |
| 9 | Colorado | #531 | 65 |
| 10 | Minnesota | #515 | 88 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Colson in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Colson?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Colson to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Colson against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).