Alan

284,872 people in America carry this name — ranked #184 of 923.

A name of the post-war decades.

Say it A luhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

AE1 L AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 284,872 2020 Census
  • Rank #184 Common
  • Per 100,000 94.3 about 1 in 1,164 people
  • As a surname 1,539 ranked #17,902 the other way round

What Alan means and where it comes from

Latin in origin, reading literally as “cheerful”.

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.

Alan name popularity by year

354,144 babies were given this name since 1882. The busiest year was 1955, with 9,053 of them.

80 90 00 10 20 30 40 50s 60 70 80 90 00 10 20

Most people carrying it were born in the 1950s. 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.

Middle names that fit Alan

Two syllables sit with almost anything — the join matters more than the length.

Better avoided

  • Alan Andrew — same opening
  • Alan Anthony — same opening
  • Alan Nicholas — 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.

Is Alan a boy's or a girl's name?

99.8% men
490 women

As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Same syllables and stress as Alan

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

This name in other languages

  • Alane German
  • Alain Fr.|It

Forms of one name traced to the same root. Spellings are as the glossary printed them, so some look older than the versions in use today.

Who has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 70.8%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 3.4%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 18.2%
  • Two or more races — 2.0%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 5.2%

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.

The most common full names

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Where in America Alan is thickest on the ground

In Hawaii the name is given 1.8 times as often as it is across the country.

  • Hawaii ×1.8
  • Nevada ×1.4
  • Maine ×1.4
  • Rhode Island ×1.3
  • California ×1.2

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.

Try it Compare Two Names

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One of those is not in the census file.

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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 Latin origin