List of Famous people named William

William Lewis (1787–1870) was an English chess player and author, nowadays best known for the Lewis Countergambit. He may have been the first player ever described as a Grandmaster of the game.

William Allen Trimble was a Democratic-Republican politician from Ohio. He served in the United States Senate.

William Blackwood was a Scottish publisher who founded the firm of William Blackwood and Sons.

William Bradford Waddell (1807–1872) is often credited along with Alexander Majors and William Hepburn Russell as the founders, owners, and operators of the Pony Express. He is described as "phlegmatic, stoical, inclined to sulk if displeased, a cautious penny-pincher, and unable to reach a decision without ponderous deliberation."

William Berry Hartsfield, Sr., was an American politician who served as the 49th and 51st Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. His tenure extended from 1937 to 1941 and again from 1942 to 1962, making him the longest-serving mayor of his native Atlanta, Georgia.

William B. Davidson was an American film actor.

William Miller was an American Baptist preacher who is credited with beginning the mid-19th-century North American religious movement known as Millerism. After his proclamation of the Second Coming did not occur as expected in the 1840s, new heirs of his message emerged, including the Advent Christians (1860), the Seventh-day Adventists (1863) and other Adventist movements.

William Bass was a British entrepreneur who founded Bass Brewery.

William Scott Darling was a Canadian-born writer and a pioneer screenwriter and film director in the Hollywood motion picture industry. He is often known in Hollywood histories as Scott Darling, though he was almost invariably credited in films as W. Scott Darling.