Pearl

At the 2020 census, 7,222 Americans bore the surname Pearl — 4,750th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 41,400.

By the numbers

People: 7,222
Rank: 4,750th
How common: 1 in 41,400
Per 100,000: 2.4

Where the name comes from

Origin English

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 80.9%
Black, not Hispanic 9.1%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 4.4%
Hispanic or Latino 4.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 1.2%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.4%

Notable people called Pearl

Judea Pearl (born 1936)Israeli-American computer scientist
Daniel Pearl (1963–2002)American journalist
Raymond Pearl (1879–1940)American biogerontologist
Matthew Pearl (born 1975)American writer
Mariane Pearl (born 1967)French journalist
Barry Pearl (born 1950)American actor
Bill Pearl (1930–2022)American bodybuilder
Cora Pearl (1837–1886)English courtesan who became famous in the Second French Empire

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

Surnames like Pearl

Also a first name

Pearl has been given to 163,010 American babies as a first name since 1880, peaking in 1918. 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.