Cleaver

At the 2020 census, 4,413 Americans bore the surname Cleaver — 7,283rd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 67,700.

By the numbers

People: 4,413
Rank: 7,283rd
How common: 1 in 67,700
Per 100,000: 1.5

Where the name comes from

Origin Middle English

Occupational surname for someone who split wood, from Middle English clevere (“one who cleaves”).

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 80.8%
Black, not Hispanic 9.8%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.9%
Hispanic or Latino 3.5%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.1%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.9%

Notable people called Cleaver

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998)American activist
Emanuel Cleaver (born 1944)U.S. Representative from Missouri

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

Surnames like Cleaver

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.