Washington

172,075 people in America carry this name — ranked #148 of 777.

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

Say it WAH shihng tuhn

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

W AA1 SH IH0 NG T AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

People counted 172,075 2020 Census
Rank #148 Common
As a first name 2,345 ranked #6,742 the other way round

Where Washington comes from and what it means

Reads literally as “originally Wessyngton or De Wessyngton”.

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.

How Washington is spelled

Washington is how 90% of them spell it — 191,416 people answer to the sound.

Washington 90%
Washburn 10%

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.

Surnames built the same way as Washington

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 — 3 syllables, stress on the first

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

Who answers to it now

White alone (non-Hispanic) — 5.8%
Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 83.6%
Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.5%
Two or more races — 6.0%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.7%

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.

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

Full names people carry

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 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