Irish

At the 2020 census, 7,094 Americans bore the surname Irish — 4,832nd out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 42,100.

By the numbers

People: 7,094
Rank: 4,832nd
How common: 1 in 42,100
Per 100,000: 2.4

Where the name comes from

Origin an ethnonym

From Middle English Irish (12th c.), from Old English *Īrisċ, from Old English Īras (“Irishmen”), from Old Norse Írar, from Old Irish Ériu (modern Irish Éire), further origin heavily debated but probably from Proto-Celtic *Φīweriyū (“fat land, fertile”), from Proto-Indo-European *péyh₂wr̥ (“fat, swelling”), from *peyh₂- (“to swell; to be fat”), akin to Ancient Greek πίειρα, Sanskrit पीवरी.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 85.2%
Black, not Hispanic 5.1%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.5%
Hispanic or Latino 4.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Surnames like Irish

Irizarry

Also a first name

Irish has been given to 1,608 American babies as a first name since 1924, peaking in 1960. 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.