The history of your name

The SCHAFFER surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 20,117 1630 0.007 75
United States (1880 census) 4,980 1233 0.01 100
Change since 1880 +15137 -397 -0.003 -25
Other Countries
Australia 179 8363 0.001 11
United Kingdom 0 0
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.

Classification and Origin of SCHAFFER

Region of origin: Europe

Country of origin: Germany

Language of origin: German

Religious origin: Jewish

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the SCHAFFER 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.

Ethnic distribution of SCHAFFER in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Black/African American 620 3.08
White (Hispanic) 276 1.37
Mixed Race 237 1.18
Asian/Pacific 74 0.37
Native American/Alaskan 66 0.33
White (Caucasian) 18,844 93.67

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

Meaning of SCHAFFER in historical publications

(origin: Dutch.) He that dishes up or provides victuals. Shaffer, German, a shepherd, a pastor, a swain.

Arthur, William (1857) An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman. Public Domain.


Similar names to SCHAFFER

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as SCHAFFER.

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 SCHAFFER

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