Skau

surname · Latin script

Meaning: foreskin on the member of male animals, particularly horses

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Skau is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • NONorway1 in 5K(measured from records)
  • DKDenmark1 in 16K
  • SESweden1 in 121K

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.

Norway (measured from records)

1,090 people

Sources
52 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 5.0K (inferred from the name graph)

Norway

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

foreskin on the member of male animals, particularly horses

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Skau 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.

Where Skau is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
NO Norway1,0901 in 5K1.1KSkau40
DK Denmark3661 in 16K366Skau52
US United States2691 in 1.2M275Skau40
BR Brazil1381 in 1.5M138——
SE Sweden841 in 121K84Skau11

1,090 people counted by SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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: SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Skau is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Norway, United States

    Also written Skaú

39 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Skau 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 Norwegian Bokmål, a forest

    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)

180018501900195020002050Laurids Skau, b. 1817Peder Skau, b. 1825Marie Skau, b. 1890Reidar Skau, b. 1893Bjørn Skau, b. 1929Christian F. Skau, b. 1939Per Skau, b. 1961Ask Tjærandsen-Skau, b. 2001

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 14 sources across 6 countries.

Official registers attesting Skau
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—1.1K#1,010
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2018558—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2019557—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2020554—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2021551—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2024550—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2023546—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2025545—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2022544—
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—366#1,259
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000275#67,113
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010269#72,332

Reference works 4

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 Skau mean, and where does it come from?
foreskin on the member of male animals, particularly horses Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
In which country does Skau have the most bearers?
In Norway, the national register counted about 1.1 thousand people named Skau, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled skau.
Where is Skau most common?
Skau is densest in Norway, where the national register counts about 1 in 5.0 thousand people carrying it.
How common is the name Skau?
In Norway, the national register counted 1,090 people named Skau, about 1 in 5.0 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Skau?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/skau

The 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, “Skau”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Skau parses inside a full name →