The first name Ivan is a variant of the name John and thus means ‘God is merciful’. It is especially common in the Slavic region. A Spanish variant is Iván and a female variant is Ivana.
Ivan is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Ivan isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Ivan ranks 138. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 16 were named Ivan. In the entire USA, approximately 137,552 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Ivan. That is 0.04 % of all living Americans.
The first name Ivan is a variant of the name John and thus means ‘God is merciful’. It is especially common in the Slavic region. A Spanish variant is Iván and a female variant is Ivana.
Ivan is very popular ... in Russia, the Ukraine, and Croatia, for example, and has also become more popular in Romance-speaking countries since the 20th century.
Ivan IV. Vasilyevich (1530-1584)
Ivan IV Vasilyevich is commonly known as Ivan the Terrible. He was the first Grand Prince of Moscow to be crowned Tsar of Russia (1547-1584). He came from the old Russian princely family of the Rurikids.
Ivan Rakitić (*1988)
The Croatian-Swiss soccer player plays as middle fielder and has been under contract with Al-Shabab in Saudi Arabia since 2024. He also plays for the Croatian national team.
Ivan Reitman, OC (1946-2022)
The Canadian director and film producer was best known for fantasy and action comedies from the mid-1980s onwards. His works include »Ghostbusters«, »Ghostbusters II«, »Twins« and »Kindergarten Cop«.
Ivan Lendl (*1960)
Lendl won eight Grand Slam singles titles in his tennis career and reached a record 19 finals at tournaments in this category. With a total of 270 weeks at the top of the world rankings, including four times at the end of the year (1985-1987, 1989), Lendl can be seen as one of the most successful tennis players. He is a former Czechoslovakian who became a US citizen on 7 July 1992.
When you hear the name Ivan, you might first think of people. But did you know that there are also places with the name Ivan? Are you also called Ivan? Maybe one day you will visit the places that are named just like you...
is a municipality with 799 inhabitants (as of January 1st 2023) in the Czech Republic.
There is a monument to »Ivan the Terrible« in the town of Orel, Russia. It shows him sitting on the back of a horse, brandishing a sword and a cross in his hands.
The island of »Sveti Ivan« is a Bulgarian island. With an area of 0.27 square miles, it is the largest of the five Bulgarian Black Sea islands.
Everyone knows him, everyone loves him and still he’s different from the mainstream: Ivan occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the nearly 50,000 different male first names that occur in the USA, only 386 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Ivan is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Ivan is not one of those names that everyone encounters in his neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, captures attention and is something special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 137,442 men and boys of all generations bear the name Ivan – that is one in 1,215. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Nevada, where one in 400 men and boys is called Ivan, while it is particularly rare in Vermont, where you have to ask an average of 29,658 men for their name to get Ivan as an answer once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter I is quite rare as a first letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an I. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With four letters, the name Ivan is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that if 1.5% of all boys' names begin with an I, this initial letter is significantly less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are boys' names with I that are quite popular, the most common at present is Isaac.
If your name is Ivan and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Ivan, you can simply say:
Igloo
Violin
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ivan
Ivan
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
V
A
N
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
I
V
A
N
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Ivan sounds like this:
