Ray
130,289 people in the United States were counted with the surname Ray in the 2020 census, making it the 219th most common in the country. That is about one person in 2,294.
By the numbers
- People
- 130,289
- Rank
- 219th
- How common
- 1 in 2,294
- Per 100,000
- 43.6
Where the name comes from
Origin a nickname
As an English surname, from pet forms derived from the root of Raymond.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Who bears the name
How people with the surname Ray described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:
Notable people called Ray
- Satyajit Ray (1921–1992)Indian filmmaker and writer
- Man Ray (1890–1976)American and French visual artist
- John Ray (1627–1705)British botanist
- James Earl Ray (1928–1998)American criminal, convicted for the murder of civil rights activist and Nobel peace prize laureate Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
- Lisa Ray (born 1972)Canadian actress
- Vanessa Ray (born 1981)American actress
- Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944)Bengali chemist, educationist, poet, historian, industrialist and philanthropist
- Johnnie Ray (1927–1990)American singer and pianist
People named Ray with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Surnames like Ray
Also a first name
Ray has been given to 210,307 American babies as a first name since 1880, 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.