The history of your name

The ROURKE surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 3,688 8263 0.001 14
United States (1880 census) 2,460 2477 0.005 49
Change since 1880 +1228 -5786 -0.004 -35
Other Countries
Australia 473 3375 0.003 29
United Kingdom 1,688 3399 0.004 37
Top States for ROURKE by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Massachusetts 408 2080 0.006 64
New York 388 4676 0.002 20
California 276 9063 0.001 8
Florida 216 8294 0.001 14
Michigan 211 5437 0.002 21
Top States for ROURKE by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Massachusetts 408 2080 0.006 64
Connecticut 207 2018 0.006 61
Rhode Island 57 2701 0.005 54
New Hampshire 65 2697 0.005 53
Maine 59 3205 0.005 46

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

Classification and Origin of ROURKE

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Ireland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

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

Classification Total Percent
Native American/Alaskan 64 1.74
White (Hispanic) 49 1.33
Mixed Race 43 1.17
Asian/Pacific 17 0.46
Black/African American 8 0.22
White (Caucasian) 3,507 95.09

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

Meaning of ROURKE in historical publications

ROURK. ROURKE. See O'Rourke.

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 ROURKE

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as ROURKE.

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 ROURKE

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