List of Famous people named William

William Forsyth was a Scottish botanist. He was a royal head gardener and a founding member of the Royal Horticultural Society. A genus of flowering plants, Forsythia, is named in his honour.

The Reverend William Webb Ellis was an English Anglican clergyman and the supposed inventor of rugby football while a pupil at Rugby School. According to legend, Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it during a school football match in 1823, thus creating the "rugby" style of play. Although the story has become firmly entrenched in the sport's folklore, it is not supported by substantive evidence, and is discounted by most rugby historians as an origin myth.

William Avery "Devil Bill" Rockefeller Sr. was an American businessman, lumberman, herbalist, salesman, and con-artist who went by the alias of Dr. William Levingston. He worked as a lumberman and then a traveling salesman who identified himself as a "botanic physician" and sold elixirs. He was known to buy and sell horses, and was also known at one point to have bought a barge-load of salt in Syracuse. Land speculation was another type of his business, and the selling of elixirs served to keep him with cash and aided in his scouting of land deals. He loaned money to farmers at twelve percent, but tried to lend to farmers who could not pay so as to foreclose and take the farms. Two of his sons were Standard Oil co-founders John Davison Rockefeller Sr. and William Avery Rockefeller Jr.

Sir William Beach Thomas, was a British author and journalist known for his work as a war correspondent and his writings about nature and country life.

William Thornton Kemper Sr. was an American banker who was the patriarch of the Missouri Kemper family, which developed both Commerce Bancshares and United Missouri Bank to become a major banking family in the Midwest.

William James Joseph Lombardy was an American chess grandmaster, chess writer, teacher, and former Catholic priest. He was one of the leading American chess players during the 1950s and 1960s, and a contemporary of Bobby Fischer, whom he coached during the World Chess Championship 1972. He won the World Junior Championship in 1957, the only person to win that tournament with a perfect score. Lombardy led the U.S. Student Team to Gold in the 1960 World Student Team Championship in Leningrad.

William Lloyd Scott was an American Republican politician from the Commonwealth of Virginia. He served in both the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate, and was Virginia's first post-Reconstruction Republican Senator.

William Gates is an American former Chicago-area high school and college basketball player. Gates was the subject of the 1994 Kartemquin Films documentary film Hoop Dreams along with another Chicago-area high school basketball player Arthur Agee.

William Kistler Coors was an American brewery executive with the Coors Brewing Company. He was affiliated with the company for over 64 years, and was a board member from 1973 to 2003. He was a grandson of Adolph Coors (1847–1929), the company's founder.

William Feiner was a German Catholic priest and Jesuit who became a missionary to the United States and eventually the president of Georgetown College, now known as Georgetown University.