Poor
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from OFr pohier 'a Picard' or OFr povre/poure 'poor'; first attested Drogo poher 1127 AC (Gloucestershire), Walter le Poure 1163 Eynsham (Oxfordshire) (A Dictionary of English Surnames)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 13 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Poor is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 3,303 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- HUHungary≈1 in 10Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- SKSlovakia≈1 in 63Kfew records
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 83K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 280 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 10K (inferred from the name graph)
3,303 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Hungary, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Poór in HU Hungary, SK Slovakia.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)from OFr pohier 'a Picard' or OFr povre/poure 'poor'; first attested Drogo poher 1127 AC (Gloucestershire), Walter le Poure 1163 Eynsham (Oxfordshire)
Cited for this meaning 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Poor is found
(measured from records)Poor counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 3,303 | 1 in 101K | 3.3K | Poor | 280 |
| HU Hungary | #943 | ≈950 est. | ≈1 in 10K | — | Poór | 37 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈830 est. | ≈1 in 83K | 150 | Poor | 71 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈380 est. | ≈1 in 107K | — | Poor | 29 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈210 est. | ≈1 in 127K | — | Poor | 44 |
| SK Slovakia | — | ≈87 est. | ≈1 in 63K | — | Poór | 12 |
| NO Norway | — | 56 | 1 in 98K | 56 | — | 8 |
3,303 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Poor is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, With no or few possessions or money, particularly in relation to contemporaries who do have them.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Different form of Power.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
In English, and adj., feli = veli; to be poor, felingo
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In stq, pair; couple
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In fro, fear
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Enoch Poorb. 1736USAmerican general (1736–1780)
- Henry Varnum Poorb. 1812USfinancial analyst (1812-1905)
- Alfred Easton Poorb. 1899USAmerican architect
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)22 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 13 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Poor mean, and where does it come from?
- from OFr pohier 'a Picard' or OFr povre/poure 'poor'; first attested Drogo poher 1127 AC (Gloucestershire), Walter le Poure 1163 Eynsham (Oxfordshire) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- What are other forms of the name Poor?
- In the etymology graph, Poore is a form of the same name in other languages.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Poor?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.3 thousand people named Poor, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled poor. After it come Hungary, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Poor?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,303 people named Poor in 2010, about 1 in 101 thousand residents.
- How common is Poor compared with other names?
- In Hungary, Poor is the 943rd most common surname of 88,284 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Poor?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/poorThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Poor” — ranked 9129th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.