Gau
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Gau is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In English, recorded as A prayer box or small container worn as jewelry and containing an amulet or similar item.
- USUnited States1 in 243K(measured from records)
- UYUruguay1 in 7.4K
- ARArgentina1 in 216K
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)
- Sources
- 224 (measured from records)
- 1 in 7.4K (inferred from the name graph)
1,367 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from ahd. gou, göu 'district, country'; also 'land' in contrast to town
Sources 1
- Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
How Gau is read(measured from records)
Gau is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Hindi52%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Gau in Hindi.
- English20%
A prayer box or small container worn as jewelry and containing an amulet or similar item.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- French11%
louse
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Gau 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 1,367 | 1 in 243K | 1.4K | Gau | 224 |
| UY Uruguay | 460 | 1 in 7.4K | 460 | — | 1 |
| AR Argentina | 211 | 1 in 216K | 211 | — | — |
| BR Brazil | 150 | 1 in 1.4M | 150 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 43 | 1 in 1.2M | 43 | Gau | 9 |
| CH Switzerland | 15 | 1 in 560K | 15 | Gau | 7 |
1,367 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal). 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Gau is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, from ahd. gou, göu 'district, country'; also 'land' in contrast to town
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In German, from ahd. gawi 'district, region'; also old word for 'country'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In German, habitational name from any of various places named with Middle High German gau, gou ‘ar^of fertile agricultural land’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In German, initialism of größter anzunehmender Unfall (“worst possible or foreseeable accident”): the worst possible accident considered for controlling, engineering, or planning when designing something such as a nuclear or industrial plant
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Franz Christian Gaub. 1790FRGerman-French architect and archaeologist
- Andreas Gaub. 1800DEGerman canon (1800-1862)
- André Gaub. 1911FRrugby league footballer
- Jacques-Antoine Gaub. 1930FRFrench politician (1930–1981)
- John Gaub. 1940former chair of the Royal Television Society
- Walter Gaub. 1956ATAustrian politician, member of the state parliament of Vorarlberg (1956-2020)
- Paula Gaub. 2001DEGerman association football player
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 25 sources across 14 countries.
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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
- Where does the name Gau come from?
- from ahd. gou, göu 'district, country'; also 'land' in contrast to town Recorded by Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung.
- What does the name Gau mean?
- In English, A prayer box or small container worn as jewelry and containing an amulet or similar item.
- What are other forms of the name Gau?
- In the etymology graph, Aue and Gouw are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Gau have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.4 thousand people named Gau, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gau.
- Where is Gau most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Gau is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 7.4 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Gau?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,367 people named Gau in 2010, about 1 in 243 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Gau?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/gauThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Gau”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.