Walker
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Thickener Of Cloth
- Origin
- English
About the Name Walker
Walker is an English occupational surname meaning "one who fulls cloth" — referring to medieval workers who walked or trampled woolen cloth in vats of water and fuller's earth (a clay used to remove oils and felt the fibers together). "Walking" cloth (also called fulling) was an essential medieval textile-finishing trade. The surname appears in English records continuously since at least the 13th century.
The name's modern American emergence is essentially a 21st-century phenomenon, riding the broader surname-as-given-name trend. Notable bearers as a surname include the long-running American television Western series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001), starring Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger named Cordell Walker — a character who anchored the surname in 1990s American masculine-cool imagination. American novelist Alice Walker (Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple) provided literary register; American actor Paul Walker (born 1973, died 2013, of The Fast and the Furious) provided millennial cultural anchor.
Walker's American climb has been substantial: the name climbed from outside the US top 500 in 1995 to the US top 200 boys' rank by 2010 and the top 150 since. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the surname-style sophistication, the inherent action-and-occupation register from the literal meaning, and the strong masculine sound. Two firm syllables, hard consonants, and tonal versatility from rural-Western to upwardly-mobile-American. The name reads as decisively masculine and classically American. Common nicknames Walk, Walks, and the rare Walker-y each carry distinct registers. There are no significant international variants since the name's first-name use is essentially American.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Walker
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Walker by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2022 with 4,248 boys named Walker (boy rank #78 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #78 for boys (4,204 US births).
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Walker Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Walker the strongest states are Vermont, Alabama, Wyoming.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vermont | #79 | 32 |
| 2 | Alabama | #79 | 747 |
| 3 | Wyoming | #82 | 44 |
| 4 | Mississippi | #85 | 386 |
| 5 | Tennessee | #91 | 1,081 |
| 6 | South Carolina | #98 | 555 |
| 7 | South Dakota | #102 | 113 |
| 8 | Georgia | #110 | 1,158 |
| 9 | Montana | #110 | 148 |
| 10 | Kentucky | #113 | 617 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #511 | 177 |
| 2 | New York | #463 | 417 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | #369 | 163 |
| 4 | Maryland | #367 | 211 |
| 5 | New Mexico | #297 | 32 |
| 6 | California | #294 | 1,461 |
| 7 | Connecticut | #290 | 72 |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | #267 | 568 |
| 9 | Arizona | #262 | 381 |
| 10 | Nevada | #261 | 127 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Walker in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Walker?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Walker to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Walker against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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