Is van a common name?

In this regard, how popular is the name van?

Records indicate that 24,687 boys in the United States have been named Van since 1880. The greatest number of people were given this name in 1953, when 574 people in the U.S. were given the name Van. Those people are now 67 years old.

Additionally, is van last name? Van also exists as a surname in its own right, but as such it’s very rare. In surnames, it can appear by itself or in combination with an article (compare French de la, de l’). The most common cases of this are van de, van der and van den, where the articles are all current or archaic forms of the article de “the”.

Simply so, what name is Van short for?

Van is the truncated form of Evan or Ivan (as well as Vance). Both Evan and Ivan are the Welsh and Russian forms of John, respectively, and so mean “God is gracious” (see the name John for more detail). Vance is the transferred use of an English surname with Anglo-Saxon roots.

What does von or van mean in a name?

In German, von is a preposition which approximately means of or from. When it is used as a part of a German family name, von is usually a nobiliary particle and indicates a noble father’s lineage. This meaning is preserved in Swiss surnames or in the Dutch van, which is a cognate of von but does not indicate nobility.

Derived from the English surname Van. It is from the Middle English vanne and the Middle French van, words denoting a type of old winnowing machine. Alternatively, the name can be a borrowing of the Dutch Van, an element in family names which means “of, from” and indicates place of origin.

Most, but not all, surnames of the German nobility were preceded by or contained the preposition von (meaning “of”) or zu (meaning “at”) as a nobiliary particle. When a person by the common occupational surname of “Meyer” received nobility, they would thus simply become “von Meyer”.