Lance

86,540 people in America carry this name — ranked #612 of 923.

Carried mostly by Generation X.

Say it LANS

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

  • People counted 86,540 2020 Census
  • Rank #612 Familiar
  • Per 100,000 28.7 about 1 in 3,830 people

Where Lance comes from and what it means

Latin in origin, reading literally as “servant”.

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.

Lance through the years

104,705 babies were given this name since 1899. The busiest year was 1970, with 4,176 of them.

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

Most people carrying it were born in the 1970s. 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 Lance

One syllable, so a longer middle name gives the whole a rhythm.

Better avoided

  • Lance Steven — runs together
  • Lance Eric — runs together
  • Lance Stephen — 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.

What Lance is short for

Lance is a short form of Lancelot.

Short forms as recorded in a 19th-century glossary of Christian names, so the list is old rather than complete.

Going quiet

Lance has more than halved in three decades. The people carrying it belong mostly to Generation X.

Is Lance used for boys or for girls?

99.8% men
165 women

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

The same name elsewhere

  • Anselot French
  • Lancelot Eng.|Fr
  • Lancilotto Italian

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.

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.

Where the name Lance is most common in the US

In Hawaii the name is given 4.1 times as often as it is across the country.

  • Hawaii ×4.1
  • South Dakota ×3.2
  • Montana ×2.7
  • North Dakota ×2.6
  • Wyoming ×2.4

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.

How to spell Lance

Lance is how 69% of them spell it — 125,848 people answer to the sound.

  • Lance 69%
  • Lane 31%

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 Compare Two Names

Put another name beside this one.

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