The PETER surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
	Total	Rank	Frequency %	Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot)	8,662	3758	0.003	32
United States (1880 census)	4,334	1431	0.009	87
Change since 1880	+4328	-2327	-0.006	-55
Other Countries
Australia	518	3109	0.003	32
United Kingdom	0			0

Top States for PETER by Total
State	Total	Rank in State	Frequency %	Per million people
California	915	3146	0.003	27
New York	772	2224	0.004	41
Florida	509	3736	0.003	32
Illinois	476	2488	0.004	38
Michigan	373	2895	0.004	38
Top States for PETER by Frequency
State	Total	Rank in State	Frequency %	Per million people
Alaska	180	344	0.029	287
Maine	131	1674	0.010	103
Minnesota	370	1422	0.008	75
Iowa	197	1709	0.007	67
Vermont	37	2548	0.006	61

Notes

Total is the total number of people with that surname.
Rank is the position in the list of names ordered by total (eg, a rank of 1 means that it's the most common name, and a rank of 10 means it's the tenth most common, etc).
Frequency is the percentage of people with that surname.
Per million people is the number of people with that surname per million of the population.

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

Classification and Origin of PETER

Region of origin: Europe

Name derivation: From given name or forename

Ethnic distribution of PETER in the USA

Classification	Total	Percent
Black/African American	609	7.03
Asian/Pacific	587	6.78
Native American/Alaskan	321	3.71
White (Hispanic)	221	2.55
Mixed Race	179	2.07
White (Caucasian)	6,745	77.87

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

Similar names to PETER

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as PETER.

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.