Murphy

298,047 people in America carry this name — ranked #65 of 777.

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

Say it MUR fee

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

M ER1 F IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 298,047 2020 Census
  • Rank #65 Common
  • Per 100,000 99.7 about 1 in 1,112 people
  • As a first name 6,019 ranked #3,451 the other way round

What Murphy means and where it comes from

Celtic in origin, reading literally as “sea warrior”.

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

  • Morty Ir
  • Murtagh Ir
  • Murtough French
  • Mortough Ir
  • Muircheartach Irish

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 has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 80.5%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 11.2%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
  • Two or more races — 3.6%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
  • 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.

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Try it Compare Two Names

Put another name beside this one.

One of those is not in the census file.

Open Compare Two Names 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 Celtic origin