Kennedy

171,457 people in America carry this name — ranked #149 of 777.

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

Say it KEH nuh dee

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

K EH1 N AH0 D IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 171,457 2020 Census
  • Per 100,000 57.4 about 1 in 1,933 people
  • As a first name 77,115 ranked #683 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Kennedy

Reads literally as “from the Gaelic or Celtic words Kean-na-ty”.

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

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

Who has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 78.0%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 13.3%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.5%
  • Two or more races — 3.9%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.8%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.6%

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 Kennedy

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.

How to spell Kennedy

Kennedy is how 91% of them spell it — 187,931 people answer to the sound.

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