Barnes

206,431 people in America carry this name — ranked #116 of 777.

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

Say it BAHRNZ

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

B AA1 R N Z — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 206,431 2020 Census
  • Rank #116 Common
  • Per 100,000 69.1 about 1 in 1,606 people

The meaning and origin of Barnes

Reads literally as “a distinguished family of Sotterly, Co”.

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.

Who answers to it now

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 61.8%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 28.9%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.3%
  • Two or more races — 4.6%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.6%
  • 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.

Same syllables and stress as Barnes

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 — 1 syllables, stress on the first

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

How Barnes is spelled

Barnes is how 44% of them spell it — 470,270 people answer to the sound.

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 Adult Height

Open Adult Height 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