Ellis

182,308 people in America carry this name — ranked #137 of 777.

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

Say it EH lihs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

EH1 L IH0 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 182,308 2020 Census
  • Rank #137 Common
  • Per 100,000 61.0 about 1 in 1,818 people
  • As a first name 25,901 ranked #1,374 the other way round

What Ellis means and where it comes from

Hebrew in origin, reading literally as “God the Lord”.

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Surnames with the same rhythm as Ellis

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) — 67.4%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 23.1%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.8%
  • Two or more races — 4.5%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
  • 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 Compare Two Names

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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 Hebrew origin