Cross
75,035 people in America carry this name — ranked #432 of 777.
A surname with a trade, a place or a father behind it.
Say it KRAWS
1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part
Phonetic transcription
K R AO1 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.
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People counted 75,035 2020 Census
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Rank #432 Familiar
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Per 100,000 25.1 about 1 in 4,417 people
Where Cross comes from and what it means
Reads literally as “at the cross”.
A name taken from a place someone came from.
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 carries it today
- White alone (non-Hispanic) — 72.3%
- Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 17.9%
- 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 — 0.9%
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.
The likeliest full names
- Michael Cross ≈ 800 people
- John Cross ≈ 700 people
- James Cross ≈ 700 people
- David Cross ≈ 600 people
- Robert Cross ≈ 600 people
- William Cross ≈ 500 people
- Mary Cross ≈ 400 people
- Maria Cross ≈ 400 people
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.
How Cross is spelled
Cross is how 77% of them spell it — 97,622 people answer to the sound.
- Cross 77%
- Crouch 23%
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.
Surnames built the same way as Cross
Ends on the same sound
- Jones 1,383,250
- Moore 696,384
- White 636,798
- King 453,539
- Scott 421,499
- Hill 419,076
- Cook 290,386
- Bell 267,025
- Doe 262,774
- Ward 255,767
Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.
Try it How Rare Is It?
Where this name sits between household and almost unheard of.
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