Henry

166,610 people in America carry this name — ranked #153 of 777.

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

Say it HEHN ree

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

  • People counted 166,610 2020 Census
  • Rank #153 Common
  • Per 100,000 55.7 about 1 in 1,989 people
  • As a first name 354,666 ranked #141 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Henry

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “home ruler”.
A name taken from a father’s name.

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

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

Surnames with the same rhythm as Henry

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.

This name in other languages

  • Hery Breton
  • Etta German
  • Jette German
  • Henny English
  • Enrik Slov
  • Jettje Dutch
  • Henryk Polish
  • Enrika Slov
  • Enrico Italian
  • Arrigo Italian
  • Henriot French
  • Henrika Swedish
  • Enrique Spanish
  • Jettchen German

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.

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.

Who answers to it now

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 58.1%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 30.9%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.8%
  • Two or more races — 4.3%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.1%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.8%

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.

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