Donovan

At the 2020 census, 38,902 Americans bore the surname Donovan — 878th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 7,683.

By the numbers

People: 38,902
Rank: 878th
How common: 1 in 7,683
Per 100,000: 13.0

Where the name comes from

Origin Irish

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh (“black”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Donovan described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 90.7%
Hispanic or Latino 3.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 2.6%
Black, not Hispanic 2.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 0.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.2%

Notable people called Donovan

Landon Donovan (born 1982)American soccer player
Donovan (born 1946)Scottish musician
Tate Donovan (born 1963)American actor
Martin Donovan (born 1957)American actor
Jeffrey Donovan (born 1968)American actor
Jason Donovan (born 1968)Australian actor and singer
William J. Donovan (1883–1959)U.S. Army soldier during WWII, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat, head of the OSS
Anne Donovan (1961–2018)American basketball player and coach

People named Donovan with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Surnames like Donovan

Also a first name

Donovan has been given to 61,904 American babies as a first name since 1900, peaking in 2003. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.