Names of Vietnam VN

Surnames in Vietnam are inherited, but drawn from a stock small enough that a few cover much of the population; the names that most distinguish Vietnam from the rest of the world are Nguyen, Thi and Tran.

Written in Vietnamese.

Population
99M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
8.2K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 8,249 name forms in our corpus.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Vietnam are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Vietnam included.

How names work in Vietnam

Names in Vietnam follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Vietnam

Characteristic of Vietnam

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Vietnam holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

ThiThanhAnhNgocMinhPhuongThuyThuTuanLinhHungDungHongDucQuangHuongKimXuanHuyTrung
Sized by how much of the difference between Vietnam's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.(measured from records)

Scripts & spelling

Nguyensurname(measured from records)
Thigiven name(measured from records)
Transurname(measured from records)
Phamsurname(measured from records)
Thanhgiven name(measured from records)
The best-attested names in Vietnam, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • Vietnamese Surname Corpus — academic citation compilation1984not a population count

    Nguyễn Văn Dung (2003), "Tên riêng trong tiếng Việt và trong tiếng Pháp", VNU Journal of Foreign Studies XIX(1):35-44, citing Lê Trung Hoa (1992) and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1975); Pierre Gourou (pre-1945 survey, cited in the same paper) counts residents: 4 surname forms for 1984. Last verified 2026-09-05.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-10-09.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Vietnam”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/VN (data snapshot 2026-10-09).