Garvin
surname · Latin script
Meaning: From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhln, ‘descendant of Gairbhln’, a personal name meaning ‘little rough or cruel one’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Garvin is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 25K(measured from records)
- CACanada≈1 in 29K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 34K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 393 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 5.2K (inferred from the name graph)
13,536 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Ghana, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhln, ‘descendant of Gairbhln’, a personal name meaning ‘little rough or cruel one’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Garvin 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 | — | 13,536 | 1 in 25K | 14K | Garvin | 393 |
| GH Ghana | #386 | ≈5,600 est. | ≈1 in 5.2K | — | Garvin | 11 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 34K | listed | Garvin | 123 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 29K | — | Garvin | 107 |
| ES Spain | — | 788 | 1 in 63K | 788 | Garvin | 58 |
| IE Ireland | — | ≈240 est. | ≈1 in 22K | — | Garvin | 49 |
| SG Singapore | — | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 31K | — | Garvin | 12 |
13,536 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; the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal). 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)
Garvin is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from OE Gārwine; first attested Godric filius Gareuina 1066 DB
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gairbhi'n ‘descendant of Gairbhm', a personal name derived from a diminutive of ‘rough’, ‘cruel’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
cendant of Gairbhin’, a personal name derived from garbh rough, cruel. 2. topographic name for someone who lived by a gate, 3. metonymic occupational name for a goatherd, or nick¬ name for a stubborn or particularly smelly person, from
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
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)
- Lucius F. C. Garvinb. 1841US48th Governor of Rhode Island (1841-1922)
- James Louis Garvinb. 1868GBBritish journalist (1868–1947)
- Ned Garvinb. 1874USAmerican baseball player
- Thomas Garvinb. 1881LKSri Lankan judge (1881–1940)
- Anita Garvinb. 1907USAmerican actress (1907–1994)
- Ted Garvinb. 1923CACanadian ice hockey player (1923–1992)
- Alexander Garvinb. 1941USAmerican architect (1941–2021)
- Ron Garvinb. 1945CACanadian professional wrestler
- Jimmy Garvinb. 1952USAmerican professional wrestler
- Grayson Garvinb. 1989USprofessional baseball 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 42 sources across 24 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 14K | #2,664 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 13K | #2,551 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 13K | #2,783 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 788 | #5,471 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 788 | #5,467 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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 Garvin mean, and where does it come from?
- From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhln, ‘descendant of Gairbhln’, a personal name meaning ‘little rough or cruel one’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Garvin have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 14 thousand people named Garvin, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled garvin.
- How common is the name Garvin?
- In the United States, the national register counted 13,536 people named Garvin in 2010, about 1 in 25 thousand residents.
- How common is Garvin compared with other names?
- In Ghana, Garvin is the 386th most common surname of 36,883 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Garvin?
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/garvinThe 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, “Garvin” — the 386th most common surname in Ghana. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.