Yāo

given name · Latin script

Yāo is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 46K(measured from records)
  • FIFinland1 in 33K
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 33K

carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

7,192 people, 2010

Record sources
104 (measured from records)

corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling

strongest: highest-authority source

1 in 33K (inferred from the name graph)

Finland

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 Yao in US United States, AR Argentina, ES Spain.

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)

Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't.

Cited for this meaning 5

  • A Handbook of African Names
  • 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
  • Wiktionary
  • Chinese Surnames Encyclopedia (Section 2)
  • The book of African names

Attested across 20 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

(measured from records)

Yāo 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 Yāo is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States7,1921 in 46K11KYao104
ES Spain8991 in 56K899Yao33
AR Argentina4401 in 103K440Yao24
IN India2611 in 5.1M261—4
CH Switzerland2541 in 33K254—4
SE Sweden2171 in 47K217—4
FI Finland1691 in 33K169—1
NO Norway1061 in 52K106—1

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; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); 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)

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

  • English surname10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Australia, Philippines, Canada

    Languages: English, Dutch

    Also written Yao, Ya-O, Ýao, Ŷao, Ýáò

  • Indonesian surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, China, Philippines, Malaysia

    Also written Yao

2 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.

Notable people with this name

(measured from records)

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 Yāo 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 Yāo mean, and where does it come from?
Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't. Recorded by A Handbook of African Names and 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples) and 3 other sources.
In which country does Yāo have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 7.2 thousand people named Yāo, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled yao.
Where is Yāo most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Yāo is densest in Finland — about 1 in 33 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Yāo?
In the United States, the national register counted 7,192 people named Yāo in 2010, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Yāo?

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/y%C4%81o

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, “Yāo”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Yāo parses inside a full name →