Van

A van is a kind of vehicle used for transporting goods or people. Depending on the type of van it can be bigger or smaller than a truck and SUV, and bigger than an automobile. There is some varying in the scope of the word across the different English-speaking countries. The smallest vans, minivans, are commonly used for transporting people from a family. Larger vans with passenger seats are used for institutional purposes, such as transporting students. Larger vans with only front seats are often used for business purposes, to carry goods and equipment. Specially-equipped vans are used by television stations as mobile studios. Postal services and courier companies use large step vans to deliver packages.

Word origin and usage

Van meaning a type of vehicle arose as a contraction of the word caravan. The early records of van as a vehicle in English are in the mid 19th century meaning a covered wagon for transporting goods (earliest reported record 1829). Caravan with the same meaning has records since the 1670s. A caravan, meaning one wagon, had arisen as an extension or corruption of caravan meaning a convoy of multiple wagons.

Smit

Smit is a Dutch occupational surname It represents an archaic spelling of the Dutch word "smid" for "smith" (metal worker) and is the Dutch equivalent of the English surname Smith.

Frequency of occurrence in general populations

Information for surname frequency in the Netherlands is limited by the end of comprehensive census taking in the year 1971. The most recent readily available information is based on the 1947 census, for which both raw census data and surname frequency data have been made available to the general public. In 1947 there were 29,783 recorded people with the surname Smit, while the general census provides a figure of 9,519,000 as the 1947 population. Working with this data the frequency of the Smit surname in the Netherlands in 1947 can be calculated to be ~0.313% or ~3,130 of every 1,000,000 people. By comparison, the most common Dutch surname in the 1947 data was de Jong, which had a frequency of ~0.580%.

An imperfect comparison can be made to primary English-speaking countries as of 1998 based on research by The National Trust. In 1998, the highest frequency was observed in New Zealand as 97.18 occurrences per million people, or ~1/30th the rate found in the Netherlands of 50 years before. Among the nations examined in the National Trust study, relative frequencies for 1991 were: New Zealand > Australia ≅ Canada ≫ United States > Northern Ireland > Great Britain > Republic of Ireland. The substantial difference between Canada and the United States indicated in this series is approximately 3.5 fold.

Jan

Jan, JaN or JAN may refer to:

Acronyms

People

Other uses

Der

Der may refer to:

DER may be an acronym for: