Waters

65,036 people in America carry this name — ranked #504 of 777.

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

Say it WAW turz

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

W AO1 T ER0 Z — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 65,036 2020 Census
  • Per 100,000 21.8 about 1 in 5,096 people
  • As a first name No not above the reporting threshold

What Waters means and where it comes from

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “powerful warrior”.

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) — 71.2%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 19.5%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.4%
  • Two or more races — 4.3%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 0.7%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.8%

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.

The same name abroad

  • Wat English
  • Waltl Bav
  • Water English
  • Walter English
  • Watier O.|Fr
  • Watlis Swiss
  • Wolder Dutch
  • Wouter Dutch
  • Thaiter Irish
  • Walther German
  • Waltier O.|Fr
  • Wattles English
  • Waldheri Frank

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.

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.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Surnames built the same way as Waters

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 — 2 syllables, stress on the first

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

Try it Full-Name Estimator

Add a surname and see how many Americans carry the two together.

Open Full-Name Estimator 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
Other names of Teutonic origin