Roman

72,391 people in America carry this name — ranked #444 of 777.

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

Say it ROH muhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

R OW1 M AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 72,391 2020 Census
Rank #444 Familiar
Per 100,000 24.2 about 1 in 4,579 people
As a first name 79,669 ranked #665 the other way round

What Roman means and where it comes from

Latin in origin, reading literally as “Roman”.

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

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

Surnames with the same rhythm as Roman

Ends on the same sound

Bowman 100,205

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

How to spell Roman

Roman is how 72% of them spell it — 100,173 people answer to the sound.

Roman 72%
Romano 28%

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.

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

This name in other languages

Romao Portuguese
Romano Italian
Romain French
Romanus

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.

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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