Yen
A surname with several possible origins, including English place-name forms and East Asian transliteration.
The #6,671 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 60,945 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The surname Yen is tricky because the same spelling can represent different origins in different places. In English-family name material, similar-looking forms are sometimes connected with place-name elements or with spellings shortened from names like Eyn, Eye, or Yan; in Manx, the word eayn means “lamb,” which may explain some island spellings or related surnames. Separately, Yen is also a common modern romanization of surnames from East Asian languages, so the spelling alone does not point to one single root.
History
In Britain and Ireland, surnames with this spelling are rare and often hard to separate from other short forms that were recorded inconsistently in older sources. In the modern United States, most bearers of Yen are likely to have East Asian origins rather than medieval English ones. Because the spelling is shared across languages, family history and geographic context are especially important for interpretation.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same two-letter surname can be completely unrelated from family to family, because Yen is both an English-looking form in old records and a standard romanization for surnames in several Asian languages.
From the historical record
“NEAGLE (Eng.) a contr. of Atten-Egle= At the (Sign of the) Eagle [E.M.E. at Yen egle — O.Fr. aigle, Lat. aquila, an eagle] , (Teut.) a var.'of Nagle, Nagel, q.v. Sir R. Matheson gives Neagle as a var. of Nagle in Ireland (Var. & Syn. Sum.”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)