Hunter

230,193 people in America carry this name — ranked #244 of 923.

Most Americans carrying it were born this century.

Say it HUHN tur

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

HH AH1 N T ER0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 230,193 2020 Census
  • Rank #244 Common
  • Per 100,000 76.2 about 1 in 1,440 people

What Hunter means and where it comes from

Reads literally as “the hunter”.

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.

How often Hunter has been given

258,121 babies were given this name since 1880. The busiest year was 2000, with 13,252 of them.

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

Most people carrying it were born in the 2000s. 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 Hunter

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

Better avoided

  • Hunter Robert — runs together
  • Hunter Richard — runs together
  • Hunter Ronald — 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 and a surname

Hunter is carried in front of the comma and behind it — thousands of Americans have it as a surname too.

Boys or girls: who is called Hunter?

95.1% men
11,364 women

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

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.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 86.3%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 1.7%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 5.0%
  • Two or more races — 4.9%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.0%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.0%

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Names built the same way as Hunter

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.

Try it Birth Plan Worksheet

Tick what matters, print it, hand it over. Nothing is stored anywhere.

Open Birth Plan Worksheet 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