Kuban

surname · Latin script

Meaning: nickname for a fixer or a corrupt official, from kuban ‘gratification’, ‘bribe’

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/kuːbɑːn/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Kuban is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • DEGermany≈1 in 102K(inferred from the name graph)
  • USUnited States1 in 595K
  • SKSlovakia1 in 10K

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.

Germany (inferred from the name graph)

≈790 people, est.

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
165 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 10K (inferred from the name graph)

Slovakia

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

KubanLatin(measured from records)
КубаніCyrillic(measured from records)

Locally spelled Kubáň in SK Slovakia and Кубан in KG Kyrgyzstan.

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 fixer or a corrupt official, from kuban ‘gratification’, ‘bribe’.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Where in the world(measured from records)

Kuban 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.

Where Kuban is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany—≈790 est.≈1 in 102K—Kuban60
PL Poland—6291 in 61K324Kuban40
US United States—5591 in 595K559Kuban165
SK Slovakia#6565391 in 10K539Kubáň30
CZ Czechia—4031 in 27K403Kuban30
KG Kyrgyzstan—≈100 est.≈1 in 58K—Кубан5

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; JÚĽŠ SAV — Databáza priezvisk na Slovensku (surname database, 1995 census); MVČR — living population register 2017; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Kuban is also recorded as 7 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Russian given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine

    Also written Кубан, Кубань

  • Turkish surname4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye, Syria, United States

    Also written Kubãn

  • Kyrgyz given name8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Kazakhstan

    Languages: Kyrgyz, Kazakh

    Also written Кубан, Кубань

  • a separate name4 spellings in the group

    Also written Kubán, Kubáň, Kubaň

  • French surname9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Togo, United States, Belgium

    Also written Kouban, Küban, Kubáň, Kūban, Kûban

  • Spanish surname6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Kubãn, Kubań

  • Croatian surname12 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Kyrgyzstan, Croatia

    Languages: Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian

    Also written Кубан, Kubãn, Kûbâñ, Kubán, Kubáň

39 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Kuban is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • from a derivative of Kuba, a short form of the personal name Jakub (see Jacob).

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Esperanto, accusative singular of kuba

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Swedish, Cuban (person from Cuba)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In tbk, gray hair

    as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0

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)

1850190019502000Josef Kuban, b. 1850Doğan Kuban, b. 1926Ali Hasan Kuban, b. 1933Bob Kuban, b. 1940Tilman Kuban, b. 1987

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)

FormalDear Kuban,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 22 sources across 10 countries.

Official registers attesting Kuban
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010559#39,352
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020557#42,002
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000544#38,263
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)2026324—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—324#10,270
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)2026305—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—305#10,686
CZ CzechiaMVČR — living population register 2017—59#25,819
CZ CzechiaKdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end)—59#9,821
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 6

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 Kuban mean, and where does it come from?
nickname for a fixer or a corrupt official, from kuban ‘gratification’, ‘bribe’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
How do you pronounce Kuban?
A machine transcription gives /kuːbɑːn/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Kuban have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 785 people named Kuban in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kuban.
Where is Kuban most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kuban is densest in Slovakia — about 1 in 10 thousand people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Kuban?
In Poland, the national register counted 629 people named Kuban in 2026, about 1 in 61 thousand residents.
How common is Kuban compared with other names?
In Slovakia, Kuban is the 656th most common surname of 69,668 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Kuban?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kuban

The 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, “Kuban” — the 656th most common surname in Slovakia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Kuban parses inside a full name →