Frances

201,693 people in America carry this name — ranked #273 of 923.

Carried mostly by the Greatest Generation.

Say it FRAN sihs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

F R AE1 N S IH0 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 201,693 2020 Census
  • Per 100,000 66.8 about 1 in 1,643 people
  • As a surname 2,086 ranked #13,871 the other way round

What Frances means and where it comes from

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “free”.

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.

Frances name popularity by year

596,544 babies were given this name since 1880. The busiest year was 1918, with 16,228 of them.

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

Most people carrying it were born in the 1920s. It has been given more 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 Frances

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

Better avoided

  • Frances Susan — runs together
  • Frances Sarah — runs together
  • Frances Stephanie — 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.

A name from before the war

The year most children were called Frances was 1918. Names of that age tend to come back once their owners are grandparents.

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

0.9% men
199,958 women

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

Names built the same way as Frances

Nothing else in the file ends on the same sound — a rare thing, and useful if you want a first name nobody will echo.

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

The likeliest 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.

How Frances is spelled

Frances is how 34% of them spell it — 586,418 people answer to the sound.

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.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 75.4%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 9.2%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 10.4%
  • Two or more races — 2.0%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 2.3%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.7%

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.

Try it First-Year Costs

Open First-Year Costs on its own page

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 Teutonic origin