Lưu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: to detain; to keep (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries
/liw˧˧/(recorded in a dictionary) Vietnamese · from Wiktionary
Lưu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 15,702 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- NONorway1 in 15K(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 21K
- USUnited States1 in 21K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. 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
- 150 (measured from records)
- 1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
15,702 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Luu in US United States, SE Sweden, CH Switzerland.
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.
How to pronounce Lưu
- Vietnamese:/liw˧˧/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)to detain; to keep
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Lưu is found
(measured from records)Lưu 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 | 15,702 | 1 in 21K | 18K | Luu | 150 |
| SE Sweden | 483 | 1 in 21K | 483 | Luu | 10 |
| NO Norway | 368 | 1 in 15K | 368 | — | 14 |
| CH Switzerland | 245 | 1 in 34K | 245 | Luu | 12 |
| FI Finland | 212 | 1 in 26K | 212 | — | 3 |
| DK Denmark | 193 | 1 in 30K | 193 | — | — |
15,702 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); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)Lưu 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 Vietnamese, Hán-Việt: lưu, giữ lại/chảy; thuộc bài đặt tên cho Diên Khánh vương.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
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. 1898CNnot in their usual name2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898–1969)
- Liu Xiaobob. 1955CNnot in their usual nameChinese 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).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Lưu mean, and where does it come from?
- to detain; to keep Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Lưu?
- In Vietnamese /liw˧˧/ (Wiktionary).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Lưu?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 16 thousand people named Lưu, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled luu. After it come Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Finland; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Lưu most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Lưu is densest in Norway — about 1 in 15 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Lưu?
- In the United States, the national register counted 15,702 people named Lưu in 2010, about 1 in 21 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Lưu?
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%C6%B0uThe 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, “Lưu” — ranked 1959th in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.