Lau'

given name · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Lau' is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Cantonese 劉／刘 (lau4), Hokkien 劉／刘 (Lâu) or Teochew 劉／刘 (lao5). Doublet of Luu.

rarermore common
  • DKDenmark1 in 9K(measured from records)
  • USUnited States1 in 11K
  • NLNetherlands1 in 25K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

29,792 people, 2010

Sources
221 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 9.0K (inferred from the name graph)

Denmark

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Lau in US United States, NL Netherlands, HK Hong Kong.

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(measured from records)

From Cantonese 劉／刘 (lau4), Hokkien 劉／刘 (Lâu) or Teochew 劉／刘 (lao5). Doublet of Luu.

Sources 4

Where in the world(measured from records)

Lau' 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 Lau' is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—29,7921 in 11K30KLau104
NL Netherlands—6831 in 25K683Lau11
DK Denmark—6511 in 9K1.2K——
PL Poland—4131 in 93K212——
ES Spain—2931 in 171K293—8
CH Switzerland—2861 in 29K286—8
FI Finland—1671 in 33K167——
HK Hong Kong#585≈3 est.≈1 in 2.3M352Lau36

29,792 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; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); This page contains a database of Hong Konger surnames and first names categorized by frequency and gender, published by; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)

Lau' is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname38 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Malaysia, Australia, Canada

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Lau, Läu, Laeu, Lâu, Låu

  • Spanish surname39 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Peru, United States, Brazil, Mexico

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Lau, Laü, Laú, Läü, Láu

  • Chinese surname6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Hong Kong, Malaysia, United States, Taiwan

    Also written Lau, Lẩu, Lầu, Lau’, Lâu

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Lâu'

5 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)

Lau' 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 mak, west

    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.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

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

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Lau' mean, and where does it come from?
From Cantonese 劉／刘 (lau4), Hokkien 劉／刘 (Lâu) or Teochew 劉／刘 (lao5). Doublet of Luu. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and Wiktionary and 2 other sources.
Is Lau' a male or female name?
Lau' is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
In which country does Lau' have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 30 thousand people named Lau', more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lau.
Where is Lau' most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Lau' is densest in Denmark — about 1 in 9.0 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Lau'?
In the United States, the national register counted 29,792 people named Lau' in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
How common is Lau' compared with other names?
In Hong Kong, Lau' is the 585th most common surname of 8,142 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Lau'?

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/lau'

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, “Lau'” — the 585th most common surname in Hong Kong. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Lau' parses inside a full name →