Adam
496,300 people in America carry this name — ranked #87 of 923.
Carried mostly by the Millennials.
Say it A duhm
2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part
Phonetic transcription
AE1 D AH0 M — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.
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People counted 496,300 2020 Census
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Rank #87 Common
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Per 100,000 164.3 about 1 in 668 people
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As a surname 15,473 ranked #2,298 the other way round
Where Adam comes from and what it means
Hebrew in origin, reading literally as “red earth”.
Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.
Adam name popularity by year
564,574 babies were given this name since 1880. The busiest year was 1984, with 24,083 of them.
Most people carrying it were born in the 1980s. It has been given less often of late.
Counted from Social Security card applications, so it covers births registered in the United States and leaves out names given to fewer than five babies in a year.
What goes well after Adam
Two syllables sit with almost anything — the join matters more than the length.
Better avoided
- Adam Michael — runs together
- Adam Matthew — runs together
- Adam Mark — runs together
Chosen by sound from the pronouncing dictionary, then ordered by how often the name is given. None of it is a rule — the ear decides.
Going quiet
Adam has more than halved in three decades. The people carrying it belong mostly to the Millennials.
Boys or girls: who is called Adam?
As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.
Where in America Adam is thickest on the ground
In Vermont the name is given 1.9 times as often as it is across the country.
- Vermont ×1.9
- New Hampshire ×1.8
- Maine ×1.7
- Wisconsin ×1.5
- Minnesota ×1.5
Measured against the state's own share of births since 1960, so a small state can lead a big one. Counted from Social Security card applications.
Who carries it today
- White alone (non-Hispanic) — 80.9%
- Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 2.9%
- Hispanic or Latino origin — 10.2%
- Two or more races — 3.5%
- Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 2.0%
- American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.5%
Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.
Spellings of Adam
Adam is how 92% of them spell it — 538,977 people answer to the sound.
- Adam 92%
- Ada 7.9%
Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.
Names about as common
The nearest entries above and below by number of people.
Try it Name Matcher
Enter a surname and hear which first names sit well with it.
The matcher is confident about clashes — rhymes, doubled sounds, colliding stresses — because those are facts about the phonemes. Ordering the names that pass is a set of rules, not a verdict on beauty.
Where this page gets its numbers
- Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
- Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
- Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.
Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers
Other names of Hebrew origin