Nguyēn
surname · Latin script
Nguyēn is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Vietnam than in any other country, where it is the most common surname. Recorded meaning: Borrowed from Vietnamese Nguyễn.
- VNVietnam≈1 in 9(inferred from the name graph)
- NONorway1 in 361
- AUAustralia≈1 in 590
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Vietnam (inferred from the name graph)
- #43 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 570 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 9 (inferred from the name graph)
≈11,000,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Vietnam, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Nguyen in VN Vietnam, US United States, AU Australia and 3 more.
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)Borrowed from Vietnamese Nguyễn.
Cited for this meaning 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wiktionary
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- Nordic Names
Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Nguyēn is found
(measured from records)Nguyēn 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VN Vietnam | #1 | ≈11,000,000 est. | ≈1 in 9 | 39M | Nguyen | 350 |
| US United States | #33 | 437,645 | 1 in 760 | 531K | Nguyen | 570 |
| GB United Kingdom | #93 | ≈66,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.1K | 5 | Nguyen | 210 |
| CA Canada | #25 | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 889 | 1 | Nguyen | 260 |
| AU Australia | #11 | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 589 | 3 | Nguyen | 308 |
| NO Norway | — | 15,162 | 1 in 361 | 15K | Nguyen | 83 |
| FI Finland | — | 7,450 | 1 in 748 | 7.5K | — | 58 |
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 article discusses the popularity of the surname 'Nguyễn' among Vietnamese people, published by Vietcetera.; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); 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).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nguyēn mean, and where does it come from?
- Borrowed from Vietnamese Nguyễn. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and Wiktionary and 2 other sources.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Nguyēn?
- Mondonomo estimates about 11 million people named Nguyēn in Vietnam, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nguyen. After it come United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Nguyēn?
- In the United States, the national register counted 437,645 people named Nguyēn in 2010, about 1 in 760 residents.
- How common is Nguyēn compared with other names?
- In Vietnam, Nguyēn is the most common surname of 62,915 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nguyēn?
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/nguy%C4%93nThe 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, “Nguyēn” — ranked first in Vietnam (The article discusses the popularity of the surname 'Nguyễn' among Vietnamese people, published by Vietcetera.). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.