Govan

At the 2020 census, 3,040 Americans bore the surname Govan — 10,105th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 98,300.

By the numbers

People: 3,040
Rank: 10,105th
How common: 1 in 98,300
Per 100,000: 1.0

Where the name comes from

. Traditionally said to derive from Irish gobán (“gag, muzzle”), equivalent to gob (“beak”) + -án. Clancy (1997) and Forsyth (2002) preferred a xcb formation, equivalent to Welsh go- + fan, the soft mutation of ban (“peak”).

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

Who bears the name

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

Black, not Hispanic 68.2%
White, not Hispanic 18.4%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 5.8%
Hispanic or Latino 4.1%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 2.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.8%

Notable people called Govan

Guthrie Govan (born 1971)British musician

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

Surnames like Govan

Govea

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.