Lê
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Vietnamese dynastic/clan name of Chinese origin; here refers to the Lê dynasty whose throne was seized in 1527
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Lê is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Vietnam than in any other country, where it is the 7th most common surname.
- VNVietnam≈1 in 45(inferred from the name graph)
- NONorway1 in 1.4K
- MOMacao≈1 in 2.4K
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.
- Vietnam (inferred from the name graph)
- #862 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 287 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 45 (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,200,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
Highest-authority source
Vietnam, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Vietnamese dynastic/clan name of Chinese origin; here refers to the Lê dynasty whose throne was seized in 1527.
Sources 1
- Tên Họ Người Việt Nam
Attested across 27 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Lê 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: Vietnamese Surname Corpus — academic citation compilation; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Lê is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Vietnamese, Vietnamese surname; appears in the stele quotation as the dynastic/family name of Lê Thái Tổ.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
In Vietnamese, Vietnamese surname; adapted to Lee because it sounds alike and Lee is common in the U.S.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
In Vietnamese, pear
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Afrikaans, to lie (to be in a horizontal position)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In egl, she, her (emphatic form)
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.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Li Yuanhongb. 1864CNnot in their usual nameChinese general and politician (1864-1928)
- Lê Duẩnb. 1907VNGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907-1986)
- Le Duc Thob. 1911VNVietnamese diplomat (1911–1990)
- Le Duc Anhb. 1920VN4th president of Vietnam (1920-2019)
- Le Kha Phieub. 1931VNformer General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1931–2020)
- Jimmy Laib. 1947CNnot in their usual nameHong Kong businessman and activist (born 1947)
- Leon Laib. 1966CNnot in their usual nameHong Kong singer and actor
- Gigi Laib. 1971CNnot in their usual nameHong Kong actor and singer
- Cung Leb. 1972VNVietnamese-American martial artist and actor
- Lê Công Vinhb. 1985VNVietnamese professional football player
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)
Attested in 24 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VN Vietnam | Vietnamese Surname Corpus — academic citation compilation | 1984 | 127 | #4 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Sukunimitilasto (Finnish surnames register) | — | 47 | — |
| VN Vietnam | Vietnamese surnames (Kaggle) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Lê mean, and where does it come from?
- Vietnamese dynastic/clan name of Chinese origin; here refers to the Lê dynasty whose throne was seized in 1527. Recorded by Tên Họ Người Việt Nam.
- In which country does Lê have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.2 million people named Lê in Vietnam, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lê.
- How common is the name Lê?
- In the United States, the national register counted 110,967 people named Lê in 2010, about 1 in 3.0 thousand residents.
- How common is Lê compared with other names?
- In Vietnam, Lê is the 7th most common surname of 62,915 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Lê?
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/l%C3%AAThe 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, “Lê” — the 7th most common surname in Vietnam. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.