Chaín

surname · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Chaín is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle English cheyne, chaine, from Old French chaine, chaene (“chain”), from Latin catēna (“chain”), from Proto-Indo-European *kat- (“to braid, twist; hut, shed”). Doublet of catena.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 1.7M(measured from records)
  • GYGuyana1 in 750K
  • NLNetherlands1 in 2.9M

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)

199 people, 2020

Sources
226 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 750K (inferred from the name graph)

Guyana

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Chain in US United States.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Derivation of Chaín: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Chaín
  1. Middle Englishcheyne(measured from records)
  2. Old Frenchchaine“chain”(measured from records)
  3. Latincatēna“chain”(measured from records)
  4. Proto-Indo-European*kat-“to braid“to braid, twist; hut, shed”(measured from records)

From Middle English cheyne, chaine, from Old French chaine, chaene (“chain”), from Latin catēna (“chain”), from Proto-Indo-European *kat- (“to braid, twist; hut, shed”). Doublet of catena.

Sources 2

  • 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
  • Wiktionary

Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Chaín 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 Chaín is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States1991 in 1.7M1.4KChain226
BR Brazil201 in 11M741—2
NL Netherlands61 in 2.9M6—7
PL Poland21 in 19M21——
GY Guyana11 in 750K1—1

199 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)

Chaín is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Chain, Chaïn

  • Spanish given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, United States

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Chain, Chaiñ

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Chain

2 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.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

175018001850190019502000Benito Chaín, b. 1762Daniel Chain, b. 1952Manuel María Chaín Pérez, b. 1962

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 1 sources across 0 countries.

Reference works 1

  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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

What does the name Chaín mean, and where does it come from?
From Middle English cheyne, chaine, from Old French chaine, chaene (“chain”), from Latin catēna (“chain”), from Proto-Indo-European *kat- (“to braid, twist; hut, shed”). Doublet of catena. Recorded by 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples) and Wiktionary.
In which country does Chaín have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 199 people named Chaín, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled chain.
Where is Chaín most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Chaín is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 750 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Chaín?
In the United States, the national register counted 199 people named Chaín in 2020, about 1 in 1.7 million residents.

What do you want to know about Chaín?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/cha%C3%ADn

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, “Chaín”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Chaín parses inside a full name →