Last Name POWELL

Summary/Contribute


Meaning	Ap-hoel, of Ap-howel. The son of Hoel. Also 'the son of Poul,' or Powl, or Powel, i.e. Paul. Probably half of Powels are of English descent. A contraction of the Welsh 'Ap Howell,' the son of Howell. It may also be deduced from 'Paul,' of which it was a former orthography: "After the text of Crist, and Powel, and Jon." Weight's Chaucer, 1229.

Origin	Welsh, Jewish, Irish, Falkland, Maori, Belgian, South african

Rank	91 (2000 US census)	85 (1990 US census)

Count	216,553 (2000 US census)

Race / ethnic distribution

The 2000 US Census claims that

69.96%, or 151500 total occurrences, of those with this family name identified themselves as being white,
25.97%, or 56239 total occurrences, as black,
0.38%, or 823 total occurrences, as Asian and Pacific Islander,
0.56%, or 1213 total occurrences, as American Indian and Native Alaskan,
1.71%, or 3703 total occurrences, as two or more races, and
1.41%, or 3053 total occurrences, as Hispanic ethnic origin.

Census 2000: how many distinct surnames are there?

Even after applying various edits and acceptance criteria to the names, there are a sizable number of unique names in the population. Over 6 million last names were identified. Many of these names were either unique (occurred once)...

English surnames

English surnames can be divided into five classes: Baptisimal or Personal (first) names, local, official, and occupative surnames. Nicknames represent the last class. Practically there are only four classes, for it is often hard ti distinguish between occupation and offic...

American Surnames

One could claim that American surnames are very straightforward to describe and identify. Due to the way this country was formed, having people coming here from all over the world, the surnames simply represent all those people of different nationalities. So, we are don...