Alexander

197,734 people in America carry this name — ranked #120 of 777.

A surname with a trade, a place or a father behind it.

Say it a luhg ZAN dur

4 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

AE2 L AH0 G Z AE1 N D ER0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 197,734 2020 Census
  • Per 100,000 66.2 about 1 in 1,676 people
  • As a first name 556,757 ranked #74 the other way round

What Alexander means and where it comes from

Greek in origin, reading literally as “helper of men”.
A name taken from a father’s name.

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.

A name and a surname

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

Surnames with the same rhythm as Alexander

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 — 4 syllables, stress on the third

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

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 55.2%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 33.3%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 4.3%
  • Two or more races — 5.0%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.6%
  • 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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

This name in other languages

  • Elek Hungarian
  • Sandy Scottish
  • Sacha Russian
  • Holex Lus
  • Halex Lus
  • Alick Scottish
  • Sawney Scottish
  • Sandro Italian
  • Sandor Hungarian
  • Leszek Polish
  • Ssachka Russian
  • Sanders Lett
  • Saunders Scottish
  • Iskender Turk

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.

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 Greek origin