Allen

465,583 people in America carry this name — ranked #35 of 777.

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

Say it A luhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

  • People counted 465,583 2020 Census
  • Rank #35 Common
  • Per 100,000 155.8 about 1 in 712 people
  • As a first name 166,924 ranked #332 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Allen

Latin in origin, reading literally as “cheerful”.

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

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

Full names people carry

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 has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 64.8%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 25.6%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.5%
  • Two or more races — 4.6%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.8%

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.

This name in other languages

  • Allan English
  • Helier French

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

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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