Paul

80,097 people in America carry this name — ranked #396 of 777.

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

Say it PAWL

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

P AO1 L — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 80,097 2020 Census
  • Rank #396 Familiar
  • Per 100,000 26.8 about 1 in 4,138 people

What Paul means and where it comes from

Latin in origin, reading literally as “little”.
A name taken from a father’s name.

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

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

Who has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 60.5%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 21.6%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.5%
  • Two or more races — 3.6%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 9.0%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.8%

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 Paul

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 1 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

This name in other languages

  • Pav Lapp
  • Pas Polish
  • Pal Hungarian
  • Pavl Ill
  • Pava Ill
  • Pawel Polish
  • Pavol Lus
  • Pavli Esth
  • Pavla Russian
  • Pavko Ill
  • Pavel Russ.|Wall.|Pol.|Bohm
  • Pavek Esth.|Lapp
  • Paval Lapp
  • Paulo Rom.|Port

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Try it Compare Two Names

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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