Léan
given name · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Léan is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle English lenen (“to lean”), from Old English hleonian, hlinian (“to lean, recline, lie down, rest”), from Proto-West Germanic *hlinēn, from Proto-Germanic *hlināną (“to lean, incline”), fro.
- DKDenmark1 in 56K(measured from records)
- ALAlbania1 in 63K
- SISlovenia1 in 84K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 122 (measured from records)
- 1 in 56K (inferred from the name graph)
1,240 people, 2020
Highest-authority source
Denmark
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
- Middle Englishlenen“to lean”(measured from records)
- Old Englishhleonian“to lean“to lean, recline, lie down, rest”(measured from records)
- Proto-West Germanic*hlinēn(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*hlināną“to lean“to lean, incline”(measured from records)
- Proto-Indo-European*ḱley-(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanicwith(measured from records)
- Proto-Indo-Europeanwith(measured from records)
From Middle English lenen (“to lean”), from Old English hleonian, hlinian (“to lean, recline, lie down, rest”), from Proto-West Germanic *hlinēn, from Proto-Germanic *hlināną (“to lean, incline”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱley-. Cognate via Proto-Germanic with Middle Dutch leunen (“to lean”), German lehnen (“to lean”); via Proto-Indo-European with climate, cline.
Sources 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wiktionary
- Deshayes, Dictionnaire étymologique du breton (2003)
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 24 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Léan 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 | 1,240 | 1 in 268K | 938 | — | 26 |
| BR Brazil | 823 | 1 in 257K | 823 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | 104 | 1 in 56K | 95 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 68 | 1 in 150K | 68 | — | 1 |
| NL Netherlands | 64 | 1 in 270K | 89 | Léan | 5 |
| AL Albania | 49 | 1 in 63K | 46 | — | — |
| HR Croatia | 40 | 1 in 106K | 88 | — | — |
| SI Slovenia | 25 | 1 in 84K | 26 | — | — |
| GY Guyana | 6 | 1 in 125K | 6 | — | — |
1,240 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); DZS — Učestalost osobnih imena (Popis 2021); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts); SURS — resident population given names; stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Léan is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Irish, affliction, grief, anguish, woe
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Irish Gaelic form of HELEN .
as a word
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 3 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 44 | #7,239 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 20 | #14,754 |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Léan mean, and where does it come from?
- From Middle English lenen (“to lean”), from Old English hleonian, hlinian (“to lean, recline, lie down, rest”), from Proto-West Germanic *hlinēn, from Proto-Germanic *hlināną (“to lean, incline”), fro… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 4 other sources.
- Is Léan a male or female name?
- Léan is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- What are other forms of the name Léan?
- In the etymology graph, Elena, Helen and Elaine are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Léan have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.2 thousand people named Léan, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Léan most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Léan is densest in Denmark — about 1 in 56 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Léan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,240 people named Léan in 2020, about 1 in 268 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Léan?
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/l%C3%A9anThe 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, “Léan”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.