Glavan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: nickname for a big-headed person, from a derivative of South Slavic glava ‘head’ (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 13 countries · latest register: DZS, 2021
Glavan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Romania than in any other country. Glavan is also written Главан in Cyrillic.
- HRCroatia1 in 4.1K(measured from records)
- SISlovenia1 in 4.4K
- RORomania≈1 in 12Kfew records
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.
- Romania (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 88 (measured from records)
- 1 in 4.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,600 people, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Croatia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Glavan in other scripts: Cyrillic
(measured from records)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)nickname for a big-headed person, from a derivative of South Slavic glava ‘head’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Glavan is found
(measured from records)Glavan 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RO Romania | — | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Glavan | 27 |
| HR Croatia | #596 | 1,025 | 1 in 4.1K | 1K | Glavan | 43 |
| US United States | — | 593 | 1 in 561K | 593 | Glavan | 88 |
| SI Slovenia | #699 | 476 | 1 in 4.4K | 476 | Glavan | 13 |
| MD Moldova | #302 | ≈170 est. | ≈1 in 15K | — | Glavan | 7 |
| RS Serbia | — | ≈63 est. | ≈1 in 105K | — | Glavan | 10 |
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: DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank). 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Andrej Glavanb. 1943SISlovene catholic bishop
- Darko Glavanb. 1951HRCroatian art historian and music critic (1951–2009)
- Damir Glavanb. 1974HRCroatian water polo player
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 Glavan mean, and where does it come from?
- nickname for a big-headed person, from a derivative of South Slavic glava ‘head’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Glavan?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.6 thousand people named Glavan in Romania, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled glavan. After it come Croatia, United States, Slovenia and Moldova; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Glavan most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Glavan is densest in Croatia — about 1 in 4.1 thousand people — even though Romania holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Glavan?
- In Croatia, the national register counted 1,025 people named Glavan in 2021, about 1 in 4.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Glavan compared with other names?
- In Moldova, Glavan is the 302nd most common surname of 6,301 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Glavan?
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/glavanThe 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, “Glavan” — the 302nd most common surname in Moldova. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.