Morris

307,446 people in America carry this name — ranked #64 of 777.

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

Say it MAW ruhs

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

  • People counted 307,446 2020 Census
  • Rank #64 Common

Where Morris comes from and what it means

Latin in origin, reading literally as “Moor”.

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.

This name in other languages

  • Moriz Russian
  • Moric Bohm.|Slov
  • Mauro Rom
  • Moritz Danish
  • Moricz Hungarian
  • Meuriz Welsh
  • Maurus
  • Maurits Dutch
  • Meurisse French
  • Maurycij Polish
  • Maurizio Italian
  • Mauritius

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.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 70.3%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 20.0%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.6%
  • Two or more races — 4.5%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
  • 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 Morris

Morris is how 45% of them spell it — 681,357 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.

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.

Try it First-Year Costs

Open First-Year Costs 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
Other names of Latin origin