The history of your name

The NEIL surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 9,209 3544 0.003 34
United States (1880 census) 4,186 1476 0.008 84
Change since 1880 +5023 -2068 -0.005 -50
Other Countries
Australia 1,509 1084 0.009 92
United Kingdom 4,890 1282 0.011 106
Top States for NEIL by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
California 845 3481 0.002 25
Pennsylvania 622 2375 0.005 51
Florida 570 3518 0.004 36
New York 490 3867 0.003 26
Michigan 415 2724 0.004 42
Top States for NEIL by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Utah 215 1400 0.010 96
West Virginia 169 1504 0.009 93
Idaho 102 1737 0.008 79
Montana 71 1611 0.008 79
Louisiana 278 2147 0.006 62

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

Classification and Origin of NEIL

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

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 NEIL 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 NEIL 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 NEIL in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Mixed Race 192 2.08
White (Hispanic) 150 1.63
Asian/Pacific 86 0.93
Native American/Alaskan 46 0.5
White (Caucasian) 7,516 81.62
Black/African American 1,219 13.24

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

Meaning of NEIL in historical publications

NEIL. NEILL. See O'Neill.

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 NEIL

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as NEIL.

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 NEIL

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