Names by origin
Two questions hide behind the same words, so we answer them separately: which language a name came from, and which languages it is used in today.
Traced back to
Names whose root the glossary places in this language.
- traced back to Roman names 196 names on file
- traced back to Hebrew names 193 names on file
- traced back to Germanic names 170 names on file
- traced back to Greek names 151 names on file
- traced back to Celtic names 42 names on file
- traced back to Aramaic names 6 names on file
- traced back to Persian names 5 names on file
Used in
Names that have a living form in this language — the name itself may come from somewhere else entirely.
- used in French names 528 names on file
- used in Italian names 497 names on file
- used in German names 435 names on file
- used in Spanish names 323 names on file
- used in Russian names 305 names on file
- used in Polish names 263 names on file
- used in Hungarian names 244 names on file
- used in Portuguese names 225 names on file
- used in Scottish names 219 names on file
- used in Dutch names 210 names on file
- used in Danish names 118 names on file
- used in Swedish names 117 names on file
- used in Welsh names 64 names on file
- used in Norwegian names 61 names on file
- used in Irish names 55 names on file
- used in Old English names 29 names on file
What is missing, and why
These shelves are built from a glossary of European Christian names published in 1884. It covers that tradition thoroughly and nothing outside it, so there are no Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese or Yoruba shelves here — not because those names are absent from America, but because we have no source for them and will not guess.
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.
- 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