Sims

109,854 people in America carry this name — ranked #277 of 777.

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

Say it SIHMZ

1 syllable · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

S IH1 M Z — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 109,854 2020 Census
Rank #277 Common
Per 100,000 36.8 about 1 in 3,017 people

The meaning and origin of Sims

Reads literally as “a contraction of Simeon or Simon, the son of Sim”.

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.

Who carries it today

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 51.9%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 38.8%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.3%
Two or more races — 5.0%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.5%

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.

How to spell Sims

Sims is how 58% of them spell it — 188,555 people answer to the sound.

Sims 58%
Simon 42%

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 Sims Which names sit well before it, and which rhyme or double up — with the reason for each.

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.

Try it First-Year Costs

Open First-Year Costs 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