Stanley

91,375 people in America carry this name — ranked #335 of 777.

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

Say it STAN lee

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

S T AE1 N L IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 91,375 2020 Census
As a first name 135,819 ranked #418 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Stanley

Reads literally as “a market-town in Gloucestershire, England”.

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

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

Same syllables and stress as Stanley

Ends on the same sound

Hanley 17,920

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

How Stanley is spelled

Stanley is how 40% of them spell it — 231,213 people answer to the sound.

Stanley 40%
Stafford 19%
Stanton 15%
Stacy 7.8%
Staples 7.2%
Starkey 6.0%
Stamper 5.4%

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

Who has this name today

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 75.7%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 14.8%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
Two or more races — 4.2%
Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.0%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 1.0%

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.

Try it Name Matcher

Enter a surname and hear which first names sit well with it.

See the first names that fit this surname

Open Name Matcher 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