Chowan
surname · Latin script
Meaning: A blackwater river formed with the merging of Virginia's Blackwater and Nottoway rivers near the state line between Virginia and North Carolina, United States
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Chowan is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 56Kas Jovani(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 117Kas Jovani
- NLNetherlands1 in 279Kas Jovani
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Chowan itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 15 (measured from records)
- 1 in 56K (inferred from the name graph)
5,955 named Jovani, 2020
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States, as Jovani
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
A blackwater river formed with the merging of Virginia's Blackwater and Nottoway rivers near the state line between Virginia and North Carolina, United States.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where in the world(measured from records)
Chowan 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 | 5,955as Jovani | 1 in 56K | 5.8K | Chowan | 7 |
| BR Brazil | 1,810as Jovani | 1 in 117K | 2K | — | — |
| NL Netherlands | 62as Jovani | 1 in 279K | 62 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 35as Jovani | 1 in 1.4M | 477 | — | 1 |
| SE Sweden | 22as Jovani | 1 in 464K | 22 | — | — |
| GY Guyana | 1as Jovani | 1 in 750K | 1 | — | — |
5,955 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020, counting the spelling jovani. 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); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); 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)
Chowan 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 English, river, county, NC
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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 5 sources across 2 countries.
Reference works 1
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Chowan mean, and where does it come from?
- A blackwater river formed with the merging of Virginia's Blackwater and Nottoway rivers near the state line between Virginia and North Carolina, United States. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Chowan have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 6.0 thousand people named Jovani, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Chowan most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Chowan itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is United States's: the national register counts about 1 in 56 thousand people named Jovani.
- How common is the name Chowan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 5,955 people named Jovani in 2020, about 1 in 56 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Chowan?
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/chowanThe 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, “Chowan”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.