Moriyama
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Moriyama is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: usually written with characters meaning ‘forest mountain’ or ‘protecting mountain’.
- BRBrazil1 in 615K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 948K
- SESweden1 in 1.3M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 10 (measured from records)
- 1 in 615K (inferred from the name graph)
351 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
usually written with characters meaning ‘forest mountain’ or ‘protecting mountain’. The latter version could be taken from any of three widely scattered place names in Owari (now part of Aichi prefecture), Iwaki (now part of Fukushima prefecture), or Etchu (now Toyama prefecture). The ‘forest mountain’ version could be taken from even more numerous place names. Neither version is common as a surname in Japan; they are found mainly in the Ryukyu Islands.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Moriyama 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.
351 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 2000; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Mayumi Moriyamab. 1927JPJapanese politician (1927–2021)
- Raymond Moriyamab. 1929CAarchitect and university chancellor (1929–2023)
- Shūichirō Moriyamab. 1934JPJapanese actor and voice actor (1934–2021)
- Daidō Moriyamab. 1938JPJapanese photographer (born 1938)
- Hiroshi Moriyamab. 1945JPJapanese politician
- Masahito Moriyamab. 1953JPJapanese politician
- Yuji Moriyamab. 1960JPJapanese animator, animation director, character designer (1960-)
- Yasuyuki Moriyamab. 1969JPJapanese association football player
- Naotaro Moriyamab. 1976JPJapanese singer-songwriter
- Mirai Moriyamab. 1984JPJapanese actor and dancer
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 17 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 364 | #53,299 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 351 | #57,914 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 344 | #62,792 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 344 | #23,600 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 17 | — |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 8 | #45,608 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 3 | #81,339 |
| 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
- What does the name Moriyama mean, and where does it come from?
- usually written with characters meaning ‘forest mountain’ or ‘protecting mountain’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Moriyama have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 351 people named Moriyama, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Moriyama most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Moriyama is densest in Brazil — about 1 in 615 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Moriyama?
- In the United States, the national register counted 351 people named Moriyama in 2010, about 1 in 948 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Moriyama?
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/moriyamaThe 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, “Moriyama”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.