Francis

78,198 people in America carry this name — ranked #406 of 777.

A surname carried in front of the comma as often as behind it.

Say it FRAN suhs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

F R AE1 N S AH0 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 78,198 2020 Census
  • Rank #406 Familiar
  • As a first name 138,493 ranked #409 the other way round

Where Francis comes from and what it means

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “free”.

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.

A name and a surname

Francis is carried in front of the comma and behind it — thousands of Americans have it as a surname too.

How to spell Francis

Francis is how 20% of them spell it — 394,129 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) — 55.7%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 30.9%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 4.7%
  • Two or more races — 4.3%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 2.5%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.9%

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 same name elsewhere

  • Franc Slov
  • Cecco Italian
  • Cecca Italian
  • Francie Scottish
  • Frances English
  • Ceccina Italian
  • Spranzis Lett
  • Francisk Wall
  • Francina Dutch
  • Francilo Spanish
  • Françoise French
  • Francisek Slov
  • Francisco Port.|Span
  • Francesco Italian

Forms of one name traced to the same root. Spellings are as the glossary printed them, so some look older than the versions in use today.

Try it Birth Plan Worksheet

Tick what matters, print it, hand it over. Nothing is stored anywhere.

Open Birth Plan Worksheet 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
Other names of Teutonic origin