1881 census occupation
Scholar surnames in the 1881 census
This page lists surnames most often recorded for children listed as Scholar in 1881. Scholar was the census term for a child in education, not a job in the modern sense.
Occupation summary
27,800 surnames are listed with this occupation, covering 4,121,311 people in the 1881 records.
The leading surname here is Key, with 801 people recorded as Scholars.
Surnames most linked with Scholar
These figures mostly count children, so they should not be read as a list of adult trades. A high Scholar count usually points to surnames found in larger families or places with many school-age children in the 1881 census.
What Scholar means in the 1881 census
In the 1881 census, Scholar usually means a child who was attending school or receiving education. It was commonly written in the occupation column because the census still needed a way to describe children who were too young for paid work.
That makes this page different from pages for jobs such as Coal Miner, Dressmaker or Blacksmith. The table below is not showing families who worked as scholars. It is showing surnames most often attached to children recorded with that census description.
For genealogy work, Scholar is still useful. A large number can point to surnames with many school-age children in 1881, and it can help separate household structure from adult employment. To understand what adults in those families did for work, the other occupation pages are usually more informative.