Neveu

surname · Latin script

Meaning: from Old French neveu ‘nephew’ (Latin nepos, genitive nepotis), presumably denoting the nephew of some great personage

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

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

Neveu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 200K(measured from records)
  • USUnited States1 in 375K
  • BEBelgium1 in 404K

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)

888 people, 2010

Sources
32 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 200K (inferred from the name graph)

Switzerland

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from Old French neveu ‘nephew’ (Latin nepos, genitive nepotis), presumably denoting the nephew of some great personage.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Neveu 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 Neveu is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States8881 in 375K914Neveu29
AR Argentina841 in 541K84Neveu32
CH Switzerland421 in 200K42—4
BE Belgium291 in 404K29——
ES Spain131 in 3.8M13Neveu7
CR Costa Rica51 in 1M5Neveu2

888 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 2000; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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)

Neveu is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Italian surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Canada, Italy

    Also written Neveù

41 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)

Neveu is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In French, Cogn.: Croatian: Nestorovic. nepotis); for the application(s) as a surname, cf. Neve. Dims.: Croatian: Neskovic, Nes(ov)ic. Vars.: Neveux, Nepveu; Leneveu.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In French, nephew

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

  • In French, de l’ancien français neveu, ‘petit-fils’

    as a nameDictionnaire des noms de famille du Canada français. Anthroponymie et généalogie. 2e édition

  • In fro, alternative form of nevod

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

  • In Catalan, inflection of nevar:

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

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)

188019001920194019601980Alfred Neveu, b. 1890Marcelle Neveu, b. 1906Ginette Neveu, b. 1919Gérald Neveu, b. 1921Louis-Paul Neveu, b. 1931André Neveu, b. 1946Patrice Neveu, b. 1954Cyril Neveu, b. 1956Franck Neveu, b. 1958Sylvaine Neveu, b. 1968

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)

FormalMadame, Monsieur,Dear Neveu, (English)
InformalMadame, Monsieur,Hello, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 25 sources across 15 countries.

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

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

How do you pronounce Neveu?
A machine transcription gives /nəvø/ (IPA) for French.
What does the name Neveu mean, and where does it come from?
from Old French neveu ‘nephew’ (Latin nepos, genitive nepotis), presumably denoting the nephew of some great personage. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
In which country does Neveu have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 888 people named Neveu, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled neveu.
Where is Neveu most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Neveu is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 200 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Neveu?
In the United States, the national register counted 888 people named Neveu in 2010, about 1 in 375 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Neveu?

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

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, “Neveu”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Neveu parses inside a full name →