Humanverse

Kern

At the 2020 census, 27,153 Americans bore the surname Kern — 1,265th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 11,000.

By the numbers

People
27,153
Rank
1,265th
How common
1 in 11,000
Per 100,000
9.1

Where the name comes from

The unincorporated community in Missouri is named after Robert Kern. The Kern River is named after Edward Kern.

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

Who bears the name

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

Notable people called Kern

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

Surnames like Kern

Also a first name

Kern has been given to 744 American babies as a first name since 1914, peaking in 1952. 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.