The history of your name

The VAN surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 12,531 2653 0.005 46
United States (1880 census) 905 5943 0.002 18
Change since 1880 +11626 +3290 +0.003 +28
Other Countries
Australia 748 2178 0.005 46
United Kingdom 0 0
Notes

'A figure of zero indicates that we don't have data for this name (usually because it's quite uncommon and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

For less common surnames, the frequency and "per million" values may be 0 even though there are people with that name. That's because they represent less than one in a million of the population, which ends up as 0 after rounding.

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the USA as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.

Classification and Origin of VAN

Region of origin: Asia

Country of origin: Vietnam

Language of origin: Vietnamese

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the VAN surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the language spoken, or religion practised, by the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Ethnic distribution of VAN in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Black/African American 644 5.14
Mixed Race 259 2.07
White (Hispanic) 173 1.38
Native American/Alaskan 45 0.36
White (Caucasian) 6,466 51.6
Asian/Pacific 4,943 39.45

Ethnic distribution data shows the number and percentage of people with the VAN surname who reported their ethnic background as being in these broad categories in the most recent national census.

Meaning of VAN in historical publications

DONNA VAN. See Donovan.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.


Similar names to VAN

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as VAN.

This does not necessarily imply a direct relationship between the names, but may indicate names that could be mistaken for this one when written down or misheard.

Matches are generated automatically by a combination of Soundex, Metaphone and Levenshtein matching.

Potential typos for VAN

The following words are slight variants of VAN that are likely to be possible typos or misspellings in written material.