Becker

84,525 people in America carry this name — ranked #367 of 777.

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

Say it BEH kur

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

B EH1 K ER0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 84,525 2020 Census
  • Per 100,000 28.3 about 1 in 3,921 people
  • As a first name 467 ranked #21,666 the other way round

What Becker means and where it comes from

German in origin, reading literally as “from lecher, the same as backer, a baker”.

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.

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.

Same syllables and stress as Becker

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

How to spell Becker

Becker is how 45% of them spell it — 187,884 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.

Who answers to it now

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 91.9%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 0.6%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
  • Two or more races — 3.0%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 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.

Try it How Rare Is It?

Where this name sits between household and almost unheard of.

Rare

  • People counted467
  • Rank#21,666
  • Roughly1 in 709,742 people

Open the full entry

Open How Rare Is It? 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