Gill

75,535 people in America carry this name — ranked #424 of 777.

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

Say it GIHL

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

G IH1 L — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 75,535 2020 Census
  • Rank #424 Familiar

What Gill means and where it comes from

Latin in origin, reading literally as “downy”.

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) — 60.1%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 12.7%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 5.1%
  • Two or more races — 3.7%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 17.9%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.5%

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

  • Gillet English

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.

Surnames with the same rhythm as Gill

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.

Spellings of Gill

Gill is how 74% of them spell it — 102,561 people answer to the sound.

  • Gill 74%
  • Gil 26%

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.

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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 Latin origin