The history of your name

The ROY surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 49,725 621 0.018 184
United States (1880 census) 5,385 1124 0.011 108
Change since 1880 +44340 +503 +0.007 +76
Other Countries
Australia 1,315 1250 0.008 80
United Kingdom 4,513 1389 0.01 98
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 ROY

Region of origin: Asia

Ethnic distribution of ROY in the USA

Classification Total Percent
White (Hispanic) 920 1.85
Mixed Race 895 1.8
Native American/Alaskan 806 1.62
White (Caucasian) 39,730 79.9
Black/African American 4,600 9.25
Asian/Pacific 2,775 5.58

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

Meaning of ROY in historical publications

ROY. Has no relation to the Fr. roi. It is Gaelic, and signifies the red-haired ; and, as such, it has often been n.sed as a sobriquet, down almost to our own times, in conjunction with, or to supersede, a family name.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.


(origin: Gaelic.) Ruadh, Roe, Roy, red-haired; also Roye, a town in England. Roi, French, king, whence Le Roy.

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


Similar names to ROY

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as ROY.

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 ROY

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