The history of your name

The BLACK surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 150,186 160 0.056 557
United States (1880 census) 38,997 119 0.078 780
Change since 1880 +111189 -41 -0.022 -223
Other Countries
Australia 8,261 143 0.051 505
United Kingdom 27,960 181 0.061 609
Top States for BLACK by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Texas 11,585 198 0.056 556
California 10,611 281 0.031 313
Florida 8,957 177 0.056 560
Ohio 7,975 112 0.070 702
Pennsylvania 7,718 100 0.063 628
Top States for BLACK by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
South Carolina 5,313 83 0.132 1,324
Alabama 5,390 96 0.121 1,212
Utah 2,644 61 0.118 1,184
Maine 1,097 180 0.086 860
North Carolina 6,902 120 0.086 857

Notes

'A figure of zero indicates that we don't have data for this name (usually because it's quite uncommon and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

For less common surnames, the frequency and "per million" values may be 0 even though there are people with that name. That's because they represent less than one in a million of the population, which ends up as 0 after rounding.

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the USA as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.

Figures for top states show firstly the states where most people called BLACK live. This obviously tends to be biased towards the most populous states. The second set of figures show where people called BLACK represent the biggest proportion of the population. So, in this case, there are more people called BLACK in Texas than any other state, but you are more likely to find a BLACK by picking someone at random in South Carolina than anywhere else.

Classification and Origin of BLACK

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: Nickname

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the BLACK surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the language spoken, or religion practised, by the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Data for ethnic origin relates to the region and country in which the BLACK surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the ethnicity of the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Ethnic distribution of BLACK in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Asian/Pacific 631 0.42
White (Caucasian) 115,118 76.65
Black/African American 27,875 18.56
Mixed Race 2,238 1.49
Native American/Alaskan 2,028 1.35
White (Hispanic) 2,298 1.53

Ethnic distribution data shows the number and percentage of people with the BLACK surname who reported their ethnic background as being in these broad categories in the most recent national census.

Meaning of BLACK in historical publications

BLACK. Blac and Blache are pras

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.


Similar names to BLACK

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as BLACK.

This does not necessarily imply a direct relationship between the names, but may indicate names that could be mistaken for this one when written down or misheard.

Matches are generated automatically by a combination of Soundex, Metaphone and Levenshtein matching.

Potential typos for BLACK

The following words are slight variants of BLACK that are likely to be possible typos or misspellings in written material.