The BARR surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
	Total	Rank	Frequency %	Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot)	42,432	738	0.016	157
United States (1880 census)	11,744	501	0.023	235
Change since 1880	+30688	-237	-0.007	-78
Other Countries
Australia	2,645	597	0.016	162
United Kingdom	11,508	520	0.025	251

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.

Classification and Origin of BARR

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

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

Classification	Total	Percent
White (Hispanic)	628	1.48
Mixed Race	492	1.16
Native American/Alaskan	386	0.91
Asian/Pacific	208	0.49
White (Caucasian)	36,063	84.99
Black/African American	4,659	10.98

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

Meaning of BARR in historical publications

(origin: Celtic. Local) The top or summit of any thing; any thing round. Bar, Gaelic, an old word for a bard or learned man. Bar, local, a bank of sand or earth, a shoal; the shore of the sea. It may be derived from Barre, a town in France, or from Barr, a parish and village in Ayrshire, Scotland.

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

BARR. 1 . A parish and a hamlet in co. Stafford; also a parish in Ayrshire. 2. The gateway of a fortified town. 3. A preDomesd. name Bar, meaning probably either A-Sax. bar, bear, or bar, boar — a sobriquet. De la Bare. H.E.

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 BARR

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as BARR.

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.