Ernst

At the 2020 census, 17,888 Americans bore the surname Ernst — 1,970th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 16,700.

By the numbers

People: 17,888
Rank: 1,970th
How common: 1 in 16,700
Per 100,000: 6.0

Where the name comes from

Borrowed from German Ernst, a medieval royal name in Germany, from Old High German ernust (“vigor, strife”), from Proto-Germanic *ernustuz.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 92.2%
Hispanic or Latino 3.3%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 2.9%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
Black, not Hispanic 0.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.3%

Notable people called Ernst

Max Ernst (1891–1976)German artist
Richard Ernst (1933–2021)Swiss physical chemist and Nobel laureate
Joni Ernst (born 1970)American politician
Fabian Ernst (born 1979)German footballer
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849)Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher
Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812–1865)Czech violinist, composer and violist
Karl Ernst (1904–1934)German SA leader
Ernst, Prince of Saxe-Meiningen (1859–1941)Prinz von Sachsen-Meiningen, Germany; painter, Prussian colonel

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

Surnames like Ernst

Ernest

Also a first name

Ernst has been given to 2,383 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1917. 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.