Morioka
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘forest hill’; mostly found in western Japan and the island of Okinawa
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/mɔɹiˈoʊkə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Morioka is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Japan.
- JPJapan
- USUnited States
- CACanada
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘forest hill’; mostly found in western Japan and the island of Okinawa. One family of Satsuma (now Kagoshima prefecture) was samurai. A few bearers may have taken the name of the city of Morioka, in Iwate prefecture in the far north, which is written with characters meaning ‘prosperous hill’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
- JPJapan
- USUnited States
- BRBrazil
- PEPeru
- CACanada
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Morioka 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 Latvian, pilsēta Japānā ("Morioka"), Honsju salas ziemeļos, Ivates prefektūras administratīvais centrs, 297600 iedzīvotāju (2015. g.)
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Kenji Moriokab. 1917JPJapanese linguist (1917-2008)
- Keiichirō Moriokab. 1922JPJapanese historian
- Masahiro Moriokab. 1943JPpolitician
- Masahiro Moriokab. 1958JPJapanese philosopher
- Toshiyuki Moriokab. 1960JPJapanese screenwriter
- Hiroyuki Moriokab. 1962JPJapanese writer
- Shigeru Moriokab. 1973JPJapanese association football player
- Ryuzo Moriokab. 1975JPJapanese association football player and manager
- Kaoru Moriokab. 1979JPfutsal player
- Ryota Moriokab. 1991JPJapanese association 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 14 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 453 | #44,654 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 428 | #52,367 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 409 | #50,960 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 203 | #36,365 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 7 | #143,513 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #69,528 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #362,990 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
- Where does the name Morioka come from?
- ‘forest hill’; mostly found in western Japan and the island of Okinawa. One family of Satsuma (now Kagoshima prefecture) was samurai. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Morioka?
- A machine transcription gives /mɔɹiˈoʊkə/ (IPA) for Japanese.
- What does the name Morioka mean?
- Recorded meaning: ‘forest hill’; mostly found in western Japan and the island of Okinawa.
- In which country does Morioka have the most bearers?
- Morioka is most frequently recorded in Japan.
What do you want to know about Morioka?
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/moriokaThe 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, “Morioka”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.