List of Famous people named William

Frederick William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer and composer of music. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848). Born in the Electorate of Hanover, William Herschel followed his father into the military band of Hanover, before emigrating to Great Britain in 1757 at the age of nineteen.

William J. Hochul Jr. is an American lawyer who was United States Attorney for the Western District of New York from 2010 to 2016. Hochul currently serves as the Second Gentleman of New York as the spouse of Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul and will become the first First Gentleman of New York on August 24, 2021, should Andrew Cuomo step down as Governor of New York, as he announced he would on August 10, 2021.

William Peter Blatty was an American writer, director and producer. He is best known for his 1971 novel The Exorcist, for which he won the Academy Award for the screenplay of its film adaptation and was nominated for Best Picture as its producer. The film also earned Blatty the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture as producer. He also wrote and directed the sequel The Exorcist III.

Clifford William Cumberbatch Simons was a Welsh-born actor best known for his role as PC Alf Ventress in Heartbeat, a role he played for 18 years, from 1992 to 2010.

William Magear Tweed, often erroneously referred to as "William Marcy Tweed", and widely known as "Boss" Tweed, was an American politician most notable for being the "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th-century New York City and State. At the height of his influence, Tweed was the third-largest landowner in New York City, a director of the Erie Railroad, a director of the Tenth National Bank, a director of the New-York Printing Company, the proprietor of the Metropolitan Hotel, a significant stockholder in iron mines and gas companies, a board member of the Harlem Gas Light Company, a board member of the Third Avenue Railway Company, a board member of the Brooklyn Bridge Company, and the president of the Guardian Savings Bank.

William Lebghil is a French actor.

William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".

Wilhelm Ralph Merton was a prominent and influential German-born entrepreneur, social democrat, and philanthropist. Among his most notable accomplishments, he was a founder of the University of Frankfurt and Metallgesellschaft AG, which became the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world and the second largest company in Germany.

William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and one of the 2 recipients of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".

William Peter Kampiles is a former United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee during the Cold War known for selling a top secret KH-11 spy satellite manual in 1977.