Higgins

75,781 people in America carry this name — ranked #422 of 777.

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

Say it HIH gihnz

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

HH IH1 G IH0 N Z — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 75,781 2020 Census
Rank #422 Familiar

The meaning and origin of Higgins

Reads literally as “little Hig or Hugh”.

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.

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

The likeliest full names

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) — 81.3%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 10.4%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
Two or more races — 3.8%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%

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 Full-Name Estimator

Add a surname and see how many Americans carry the two together.

Open Full-Name Estimator 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