Lawrence

124,450 people in America carry this name — ranked #246 of 777.

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

Say it LAW ruhns

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

L AO1 R AH0 N S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 124,450 2020 Census
Rank #246 Common
Per 100,000 41.6 about 1 in 2,663 people
As a first name 240,687 ranked #234 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Lawrence

Latin in origin, reading literally as “laurel”.

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

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

The most common 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.

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

Who has this name today

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 65.5%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 24.3%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.7%
Two or more races — 4.6%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.0%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.9%

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.

How to spell Lawrence

Lawrence is how 52% of them spell it — 238,972 people answer to the sound.

Lawrence 52%
Lawson 48%

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
Other names of Latin origin