颜
surname · Han script
Meaning: from a fief name in Lu; also from the Cao clan by an ancestor's style name
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
颜 is a surname written in the Han script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- CNChina≈1 in 52K(inferred from the name graph)
- MOMacao≈1 in 15K
- HKHong Kong≈1 in 23K
carrying the name, as Mondonomo estimates it from our sources: no national register counts it in these countries. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #457 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 72 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
≈27,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
Highest-authority source
Macao, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from a fief name in Lu; also from the Cao clan by an ancestor's style name
Sources 1
- 新华姓氏词典 (Xinhua dictionary of Chinese surnames)
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
颜 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.
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: the cn-chinesenames register. 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)
颜 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 Chinese, color; face; countenance
as a wordMDBG Chinese Dictionary (CC-CEDICT) — surname sense
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 3 sources across 1 country.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | ChineseNames: household-registered population — surnames + given names (no time axis) | — | 1.4M | #124 |
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 颜 mean, and where does it come from?
- from a fief name in Lu; also from the Cao clan by an ancestor's style name Recorded by 新华姓氏词典 (Xinhua dictionary of Chinese surnames).
- In which country does 颜 have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 27 thousand people named 颜 in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled 颜.
- How common is the name 颜?
- Mondonomo estimates about 27,000 people in China have 颜 as their first surname, about 1 in 52 thousand residents. No national register counts it there; the figure is ours, calibrated against the registers that do.
- How common is 颜 compared with other names?
- In China, 颜 is the 118th most common surname of 142,871 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about 颜?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/%E9%A2%9CThe 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, “颜” — the 118th most common surname in China. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.