Dunn

137,243 people in America carry this name — ranked #204 of 777.

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

Say it DUHN

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

  • People counted 137,243 2020 Census
  • Rank #204 Common
  • Per 100,000 45.9 about 1 in 2,415 people

What Dunn means and where it comes from

Reads literally as “dun, a heap, hill, mount”.

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.

How Dunn is spelled

Dunn is how 51% of them spell it — 266,951 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

Surnames built the same way as Dunn

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 1 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) — 77.1%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 14.0%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
  • Two or more races — 4.0%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.9%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.6%

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 counted194
  • Rank#39,134
  • Roughly1 in 1,708,501 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