Neal

87,995 people in America carry this name — ranked #348 of 777.

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

Say it NEEL

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

N IY1 L — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 87,995 2020 Census
Rank #348 Familiar
Per 100,000 29.4 about 1 in 3,767 people
As a first name 37,392 ranked #1,106 the other way round

Where Neal comes from and what it means

Celtic in origin, reading literally as “chief”.

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

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

Who answers to it now

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 59.2%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 31.3%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.3%
Two or more races — 5.0%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.6%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.7%

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

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

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.

Try it Name Matcher

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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 Celtic origin