Gregory

85,781 people in America carry this name — ranked #360 of 777.

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

Say it GREH gur ee

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

G R EH1 G ER0 IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 85,781 2020 Census
Rank #360 Familiar
Per 100,000 28.7 about 1 in 3,864 people
As a first name 503,949 ranked #84 the other way round

What Gregory means and where it comes from

Greek in origin, reading literally as “watchman”.

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

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

Full names people carry

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

By sound First names that fit Gregory Which names sit well before it, and which rhyme or double up — with the reason for each.

Who answers to it now

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 75.9%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 15.0%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.5%
Two or more races — 4.2%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.8%

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.

Same syllables and stress as Gregory

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 — 3 syllables, stress on the first

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

Try it First-Year Costs

Open First-Year Costs 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 Greek origin