Duncan

129,708 people in America carry this name — ranked #222 of 777.

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

Say it DUHNG kuhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

D AH1 NG K AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 129,708 2020 Census
  • Rank #222 Common

Where Duncan comes from and what it means

Celtic in origin, reading literally as “brown chief”.

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.

Spellings of Duncan

Duncan is how 49% of them spell it — 266,951 people answer to the sound.

  • Dunn 51%
  • Duncan 49%

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 Duncan

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 — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

Who has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 72.9%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 17.3%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.6%
  • Two or more races — 4.6%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.6%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.0%

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.

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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 Celtic origin