Wān
surname · Latin script
Wān is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Malaysia it is the 41st most common given name. Recorded meaning: From Middle English wan, wanne (“grey, leaden; pale grey, ashen; blue-black (like a bruise); dim, faint; dark, gloomy”), from Old English wann (“dark, dusky”), from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swar.
- SESweden1 in 63K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 128K
- ISIceland1 in 175K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 360 (measured from records)
- 1 in 63K (inferred from the name graph)
2,599 people, 2020
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Sweden
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Wan in MY Malaysia, US United States.
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 Englishwan“grey(measured from records)
- Old Englishwann“dark“dark, dusky”(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*wannaz“dark“dark, swart”(measured from records)
From Middle English wan, wanne (“grey, leaden; pale grey, ashen; blue-black (like a bruise); dim, faint; dark, gloomy”), from Old English wann (“dark, dusky”), from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swart”), of uncertain origin. Cognate with Old Frisian wann, wonn (“dark”).
Cited for this meaning 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wiktionary
- Chinese Surnames Encyclopedia (Section 2)
- Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007)
Attested across 29 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Wān 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.
2,599 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: data.gov.my — Name Popularity Dashboard (JPN, by decade and ethnicity); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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)Wān is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin reading of 兲
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)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).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Wān mean, and where does it come from?
- From Middle English wan, wanne (“grey, leaden; pale grey, ashen; blue-black (like a bruise); dim, faint; dark, gloomy”), from Old English wann (“dark, dusky”), from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swar… Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and Wiktionary and 2 other sources.
- In which country does Wān have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 2.6 thousand people named Wān, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled wan.
- Where is Wān most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Wān is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 63 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Wān?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,599 people named Wān in 2020, about 1 in 128 thousand residents.
- How common is Wān compared with other names?
- In Malaysia, Wān is the 41st most common given name of 388,685 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Wān?
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/w%C4%81nThe 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, “Wān” — the 41st most common given name in Malaysia. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.