Barney

At the 2020 census, 15,671 Americans bore the surname Barney — 2,261st out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 19,100.

By the numbers

People: 15,671
Rank: 2,261st
How common: 1 in 19,100
Per 100,000: 5.2

Where the name comes from

From either the Old English personal name Bera (genitive singular Beran) or from Old English beren (“growing with barley”) + īeġ (“island”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Barney described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 76.4%
Black, not Hispanic 12.0%
Hispanic or Latino 3.9%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 3.1%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.7%

Notable people called Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972)American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris
Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931)American painter
Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883–1971)American civil engineer, architect and suffragist
Matthew Barney (born 1967)American sculptor and filmmaker
Ida Barney (1886–1982)American astronomer

People named Barney with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Surnames like Barney

Also a first name

Barney has been given to 16,181 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1919. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.