Norman

63,944 people in America carry this name — ranked #514 of 777.

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

Say it NAWR muhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

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

People counted 63,944 2020 Census
Per 100,000 21.4 about 1 in 5,183 people
As a first name 109,382 ranked #518 the other way round

Where Norman comes from and what it means

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “Niord’s man”.

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

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

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.

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

How to spell Norman

Norman is how 52% of them spell it — 123,610 people answer to the sound.

Norman 52%
Norton 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.

Who carries it today

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 66.6%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 24.3%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.3%
Two or more races — 4.4%
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.

Same syllables and stress as Norman

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 same name elsewhere

Tormaid Gaelic

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 How Rare Is It?

Where this name sits between household and almost unheard of.

Common

People counted109,382
Rank#518
Roughly1 in 3,030 people

Open the full entry

Open How Rare Is It? 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 Teutonic origin