Stern

At the 2020 census, 24,632 Americans bore the surname Stern — 1,406th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 12,100.

By the numbers

People: 24,632
Rank: 1,406th
How common: 1 in 12,100
Per 100,000: 8.2

Where the name comes from

As a German and Jewish surname, from the noun Stern (“star”). This was also borrowed into various Slavic languages such as Serbo-Crotian and Slovenian.

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

Who bears the name

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

White, not Hispanic 91.4%
Hispanic or Latino 3.3%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 2.1%
Black, not Hispanic 2.1%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.2%

Notable people called Stern

Otto Stern (1888–1969)German-American physicist
Daniel Stern (born 1957)American actor, artist, director and screenwriter
Howard Stern (born 1954)American radio and television personality
Isaac Stern (1920–2001)American musician
William Stern (1871–1938)German psychologist
David Stern (1942–2020)Commissioner of the National Basketball Association
Lina Stern (1878–1968)Soviet biochemist, physiologist and humanist
Avraham Stern (1907–1942)Jewish paramilitary leader and founder of Lehi

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

Surnames like Stern

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.