The history of your name

The OWEN surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 60,461 496 0.022 224
United States (1880 census) 19,327 274 0.039 387
Change since 1880 +41134 -222 -0.017 -163
Other Countries
Australia 5,127 273 0.031 314
United Kingdom 47,875 87 0.104 1,042
Top States for OWEN by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Texas 5,460 424 0.026 262
California 5,091 595 0.015 150
Florida 3,497 518 0.022 219
North Carolina 3,282 312 0.041 408
Virginia 2,615 296 0.037 369
Top States for OWEN by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Alabama 2,046 315 0.046 460
Tennessee 2,476 330 0.044 435
Oklahoma 1,476 261 0.043 428
North Carolina 3,282 312 0.041 408
Arkansas 1,039 297 0.039 389

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

Classification and Origin of OWEN

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Wales

Language of origin: Welsh

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 OWEN 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 OWEN 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 OWEN in the USA

Classification Total Percent
White (Hispanic) 955 1.58
Mixed Race 774 1.28
Native American/Alaskan 526 0.87
Asian/Pacific 333 0.55
White (Caucasian) 56,446 93.36
Black/African American 1,433 2.37

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

Meaning of OWEN in historical publications

(origin: Celtic.) The good offspring. Oen, Welsh, and Gaelic, uan, a lamb.

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


OWEN. A personal name in Wales. Most of our Owens are from that principality, but it is possible that a few may be of Saxon blood, for there is an Owiue in the Domesday of Yorkshire, and a still earlier Owiue occurs in the Codex Diplomaticus. It is one of the most common of Welsh surnames. As I have elsewhere observed in this volume, the commonness of AVelsh patronymics has tended to a great confusion of the ' gentle ' and the ' simple ' in Wales. There are thousands of Owens who bear that name simply because their grandfathers or perhaps their fathers bore it as a Christian name. In ancient families the patryuomic became a statiouarj' family name about the tunes of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth.

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 OWEN

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as OWEN.

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 OWEN

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