Liú
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Hanyu Pinyin reading of 劉 /刘 (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
Liú is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Hong Kong it is the 16th most common surname. Liú is also written Лю in Cyrillic, 리우 in Korean (Hangul) and Λιου in Greek.
- CNChina≈1 in 26(inferred from the name graph)
- TWTaiwan≈1 in 39
- HKHong Kong≈1 in 160
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Liú itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #614 (measured from records)
- 5 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 521 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 26 (inferred from the name graph)
≈54,000,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
China, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Liú in other scripts: Cyrillic, Korean (Hangul), Greek and 1 more
(measured from records)Locally spelled Liu in US United States, CN China, TW Taiwan 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)Hanyu Pinyin reading of 劉 /刘
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Liú is found
(measured from records)Liú 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | #254 | ≈54,000,000 est. | ≈1 in 26 | — | Liu | 284 |
| TW Taiwan | #102 | ≈600,000 est. | ≈1 in 39 | — | Liu | 209 |
| US United States | #285 | 78,370 | 1 in 4.2K | 127K | Liu | 521 |
| HK Hong Kong | #16 | ≈47,000 est. | ≈1 in 159 | — | Liu | 140 |
| MY Malaysia | #225 | ≈27,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Liu | 79 |
| SG Singapore | #32 | ≈7,500 est. | ≈1 in 807 | — | Liu | 147 |
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. 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)Liú is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Irish, verbal noun of liúigh
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)- Liu Shaoqib. 1898CN2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898–1969)
- Liu Xiaobob. 1955CNChinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist (1955–2017)
- Andy Laub. 1961CNnot in their usual nameHong Kong actor, film producer, and singer
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
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Liú mean, and where does it come from?
- Hanyu Pinyin reading of 劉 /刘 Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Liú?
- Mondonomo estimates about 54 million people named Liú in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled liu. After it come Taiwan, United States, Hong Kong and Malaysia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Liú?
- In the United States, the national register counted 78,370 people named Liú in 2010, about 1 in 4.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Liú compared with other names?
- In China, Liú is the 254th most common surname of 142,871 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Liú?
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/li%C3%BAThe 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, “Liú” — the 254th most common surname in China. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.