Ĺâm
surname · Latin script
Ĺâm is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 55,554 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010. Recorded meaning: Romanization of Cantonese 林 (lam⁴), via English Lam. Doublet of Lim.
- GYGuyana1 in 4.3K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 6K
- NONorway1 in 7.6K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 83 (measured from records)
- 1 in 4.3K (inferred from the name graph)
55,554 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Lam in US United States, DZ Algeria.
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)Romanization of Cantonese 林 (lam⁴), via English Lam. Doublet of Lim.
Cited for this meaning 5
- A dictionary of surnames
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
- Wiktionary
- Nordic Names
Attested across 25 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Ĺâm is found
(measured from records)Ĺâm 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 55,554 | 1 in 6K | 60K | Lam | 83 |
| SE Sweden | — | 743 | 1 in 14K | 743 | — | 4 |
| NO Norway | — | 722 | 1 in 7.6K | 722 | — | 4 |
| DK Denmark | — | 534 | 1 in 11K | 534 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | — | 531 | 1 in 16K | 531 | — | 3 |
| DZ Algeria | #180 | ≈490 est. | ≈1 in 96K | — | Lam | 15 |
| FI Finland | — | 419 | 1 in 13K | 419 | — | 2 |
| GY Guyana | — | 175 | 1 in 4.3K | 175 | — | — |
55,554 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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Ĺâm mean, and where does it come from?
- Romanization of Cantonese 林 (lam⁴), via English Lam. Doublet of Lim. Recorded by A dictionary of surnames and Dictionary of American Family Names and 3 other sources.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Ĺâm?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 56 thousand people named Ĺâm, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lam. After it come Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Ĺâm most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Ĺâm is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 4.3 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Ĺâm?
- In the United States, the national register counted 55,554 people named Ĺâm in 2010, about 1 in 6.0 thousand residents.
- How common is Ĺâm compared with other names?
- In Algeria, Ĺâm is the 180th most common surname of 89,473 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Ĺâm?
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/%C4%BA%C3%A2mThe 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, “Ĺâm” — ranked 555th in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.