Яо

surname · Cyrillic script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Яо is a surname written in the Cyrillic script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • RURussia≈1 in 1.5M(inferred from the name graph)
  • FIFinland1 in 33Kas Yao
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 33Kas Yao

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Яо itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

7,192 named Yao, 2010

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
67 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 1.5M (inferred from the name graph)

Russia, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

ЯоCyrillic(measured from records)
YaoLatin(measured from records)

Locally spelled Yao 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

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Attested across 11 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Яо 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 Яо is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States7,192as Yao1 in 46K11KYao16
ES Spain899as Yao1 in 56K899—1
AR Argentina440as Yao1 in 103K440——
IN India261as Yao1 in 5.1M261—1
CH Switzerland254as Yao1 in 33K254—1
SE Sweden217as Yao1 in 47K217—1
FI Finland169as Yao1 in 33K169—2
NO Norway106as Yao1 in 52K106——
RU Russia≈97 est.≈1 in 1.5M—Яо67

7,192 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)

Яо is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Croatian surname13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in China, United States, Croatia, Philippines

    Languages: Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian

    Also written Yao, Jao, Јао

  • Persian surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in China, United States

    Also written Yao

4 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.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Яо is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Russian, nuclear weapons

    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)

12001400160018002000Yao Guang Xiao, b. 1335Yao Lee, b. 1922Yao Wenyuan, b. 1931Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, b. 1946Frances Yao, b. 1950Kazuki Yao, b. 1959Claire Yiu, b. 1978Yao Chen, b. 1979Yao Ming, b. 1980Yao Xingtong, b. 1983

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)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Яо under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

In which country does Яо have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 7.2 thousand people named Yao, more than in any other country we hold.
How common is the name Яо?
In the United States, the national register counted 7,192 people named Yao in 2010, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Яо?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/%D1%8F%D0%BE

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, “Яо”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Яо parses inside a full name →