The history of your name

The BRIEN surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 2,565 11302 0.001 10
United States (1880 census) 796 6575 0.002 16
Change since 1880 +1769 -4727 -0.001 -6
Other Countries
Australia 931 1769 0.006 57
United Kingdom 973 5371 0.002 21
Top States for BRIEN by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
New York 241 6880 0.001 13
Massachusetts 206 3598 0.003 32
California 170 12587 0.001 5
Louisiana 133 3603 0.003 30
Florida 127 12081 0.001 8
Top States for BRIEN by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
North Dakota 70 1012 0.011 109
Rhode Island 112 1170 0.011 107
New Hampshire 74 2200 0.006 60
Montana 53 1916 0.006 59
Vermont 30 2860 0.005 49

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 BRIEN live. This obviously tends to be biased towards the most populous states. The second set of figures show where people called BRIEN represent the biggest proportion of the population. So, in this case, there are more people called BRIEN in New York than any other state, but you are more likely to find a BRIEN by picking someone at random in North Dakota than anywhere else.

Classification and Origin of BRIEN

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Ireland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: From given name or forename

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the BRIEN 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 BRIEN 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 BRIEN in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Native American/Alaskan 227 8.85
White (Hispanic) 78 3.04
Mixed Race 44 1.72
Black/African American 30 1.17
Asian/Pacific 10 0.39
White (Caucasian) 2,176 84.83

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

Meaning of BRIEN in historical publications

Sorry, we don't have any information on the meaning of BRIEN.

Similar names to BRIEN

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as BRIEN.

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 BRIEN

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