Lucas

102,949 people in America carry this name — ranked #299 of 777.

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

Say it LOO kuhs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

L UW1 K AH0 S — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 102,949 2020 Census
  • As a first name 249,246 ranked #220 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Lucas

Latin in origin, reading literally as “light”.

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

Lucas 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 Lucas

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.

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

The same name elsewhere

  • Luke English
  • Luka Russ.|Wall
  • Luce French
  • Luca French
  • Luzio Italian
  • Lukas Ger.|Bohm
  • Lucio Italian
  • Luzija Russian
  • Luzian Russian
  • Lucius English
  • Lucien French
  • Lucian English
  • Luziano Italian
  • Luciano Italian

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.

Try it Compare Two Names

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One of those is not in the census file.

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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