Howell

107,414 people in America carry this name — ranked #286 of 777.

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

Say it HOW uhl

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

HH AW1 AH0 L — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 107,414 2020 Census
  • Rank #286 Common
  • As a first name 1,667 ranked #8,649 the other way round

Where Howell comes from and what it means

Cornish in origin, reading literally as “from Houl, the sun”.

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.

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) — 76.3%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 14.9%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
  • Two or more races — 4.1%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.6%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native 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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Same syllables and stress as Howell

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

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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