Ivory

Ivory is the 4,894th most common surname in the United States, shared by 6,988 people at the 2020 census. That is about one person in 42,800.

By the numbers

People: 6,988
Rank: 4,894th
How common: 1 in 42,800
Per 100,000: 2.3

Where the name comes from

Origin Old French

The surname is habitational from Ivry in Normandy, and in some cases patronymic from a diminutive of Ivor. The modern given name is associated with ivory.

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

Who bears the name

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

Black, not Hispanic 69.4%
White, not Hispanic 21.4%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 5.6%
Hispanic or Latino 2.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Ivory

James Ivory (born 1928)American film director
James Ivory (1765–1842)Scottish mathematician

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

Also a first name

Ivory has been given to 23,114 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 2025. 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.