Fǎn
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Fǎn is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: table From Middle English fan, from Old English fann (“a winnowing, fan”), from Latin vannus (“fan for winnowing grain”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”).
- FIFinland1 in 26K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 39K
- SESweden1 in 66K
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
- 14 (measured from records)
- 1 in 26K (inferred from the name graph)
8,441 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Fan in 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 Englishfan(measured from records)
- Old Englishfann“a winnowing“a winnowing, fan”(measured from records)
- Latinvannus“fan for winnowing grain”(measured from records)
- Proto-Indo-European*h₂weh₁-“to blow”(measured from records)
table From Middle English fan, from Old English fann (“a winnowing, fan”), from Latin vannus (“fan for winnowing grain”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). Cognate with Latin ventus (“wind”), Dutch wan (“fan”), German Wanne (“winnowing basket”), Swedish vanna (“a fan for winnowing”), Old English windwian (“to fan, winnow”). More at winnow.
Sources 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- A Frequency Dictionary of German
- Wiktionary
- Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007)
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Fǎn 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 | 8,441 | 1 in 39K | 13K | Fan | 14 |
| BR Brazil | 694 | 1 in 305K | 694 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 630 | 1 in 79K | 630 | — | 2 |
| FI Finland | 214 | 1 in 26K | 214 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 208 | 1 in 219K | 208 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 155 | 1 in 66K | 155 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 108 | 1 in 78K | 108 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | 85 | 1 in 69K | 85 | — | — |
8,441 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Fǎn mean, and where does it come from?
- table From Middle English fan, from Old English fann (“a winnowing, fan”), from Latin vannus (“fan for winnowing grain”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and A Frequency Dictionary of German and 2 other sources.
- Is Fǎn a male or female name?
- Fǎn 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.
- In which country does Fǎn have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 8.4 thousand people named Fǎn, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled fan.
- Where is Fǎn most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Fǎn is densest in Finland — about 1 in 26 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Fǎn?
- In the United States, the national register counted 8,441 people named Fǎn in 2010, about 1 in 39 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Fǎn?
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/f%C7%8EnThe 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, “Fǎn”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.