American Surnames

The history of your name

The PEN surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 1,079 22283 0 4
United States (1880 census) 148 23960 0 3
Change since 1880 +931 +1677 +N/A +1
Other Countries
Australia 63 21111 0 4
United Kingdom 0 0
Top States for PEN by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
California 242 12044 0.001 7
Massachusetts 176 5420 0.003 28
Washington 115 7363 0.002 20
New York 67 31053 0.000 4
Texas 55 27381 0.000 3
Top States for PEN by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Massachusetts 176 5420 0.003 28
Washington 115 7363 0.002 20
Nevada 23 11679 0.001 12
Rhode Island 11 14896 0.001 10
California 242 12044 0.001 7

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

Classification and Origin of PEN

Sorry, we don't have any origin and classification information for the PEN surname.

Ethnic distribution of PEN in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Asian/Pacific 825 76.46
White (Caucasian) 139 12.88
Mixed Race 57 5.28
White (Hispanic) 35 3.24
Black/African American Less than 100 Insignificant
Native American/Alaskan Less than 100 Insignificant

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

PEN is a genuine surname, but it's an uncommon one. Did you possibly mean one of these instead?

Meaning of PEN in historical publications

6 PEN. See under CORXISH SUK>;ajies.

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 PEN

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as PEN.

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 PEN

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