Kirby

At the 2020 census, 51,620 Americans bore the surname Kirby — 641st out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 5,790.

By the numbers

People: 51,620
Rank: 641st
How common: 1 in 5,790
Per 100,000: 17.3

Where the name comes from

Origin Old English

Originally Kirkby, from "village with a church".

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 83.0%
Black, not Hispanic 8.9%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.9%
Hispanic or Latino 2.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.7%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.6%

Notable people called Kirby

Jack Kirby (1917–1994)American comic book artist
Vanessa Kirby (born 1988)British actress
Bruno Kirby (1949–2006)American actor
Fran Kirby (born 1993)English association football player
William Kirby (1759–1850)British entomologist
Kathy Kirby (1938–2011)British singer
John Kirby (born 1963)United States Navy rear admiral and Pentagon spokesperson
Luke Kirby (born 1978)Canadian actor

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

Surnames like Kirby

Also a first name

Kirby has been given to 18,495 American babies as a first name since 1881, peaking in 1957. 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.