The history of your name

The POTTER surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 71,103 413 0.026 264
United States (1880 census) 23,717 216 0.047 474
Change since 1880 +47386 -197 -0.021 -210
Other Countries
Australia 5,174 270 0.032 317
United Kingdom 23,766 222 0.052 517
Top States for POTTER by Total
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
California 5,211 600 0.015 154
Florida 4,178 437 0.026 261
New York 4,157 367 0.022 219
Texas 4,088 604 0.020 196
Michigan 3,886 216 0.039 391
Top States for POTTER by Frequency
State Total Rank in State Frequency % Per million people
Vermont 449 124 0.074 737
Maine 718 301 0.056 563
Wyoming 262 147 0.053 531
New Hampshire 626 225 0.051 507
Kentucky 1,909 295 0.047 472

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

Classification and Origin of POTTER

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: England

Language of origin: English

Ethnic origin: English

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: Occupational Name

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

Classification Total Percent
Native American/Alaskan 555 0.78
Asian/Pacific 334 0.47
White (Caucasian) 64,227 90.33
Black/African American 3,690 5.19
Mixed Race 1,081 1.52
White (Hispanic) 1,209 1.7

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

Meaning of POTTER in historical publications

POTTER. Figulus— a maker of pots.

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 POTTER

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as POTTER.

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 POTTER

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