Sâo

loc · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Sâo is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: fat of swine or dog.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 455K(measured from records)
  • SESweden1 in 567K
  • BRBrazil1 in 649K

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)

731 people, 2020

Sources
162 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 455K (inferred from the name graph)

United States

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Sao in BR Brazil.

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)

fat of swine or dog

Sources 1

  • Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007)

Attested across 20 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Sâo 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 Sâo is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States7311 in 455K1.6K—42
BR Brazil3261 in 649K326Sao1
SE Sweden181 in 567K18—1
NL Netherlands81 in 2.2M24—1
CR Costa Rica41 in 1.3M4——

731 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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)

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

  • Turkish given name5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye

    Also written Şao, São, Sao

3 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.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Sâo under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Sâo mean, and where does it come from?
fat of swine or dog Recorded by Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007).
In which country does Sâo have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 731 people named Sâo, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Sâo most common?
Sâo is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 455 thousand people carrying it.
How common is the name Sâo?
In the United States, the national register counted 731 people named Sâo in 2020, about 1 in 455 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Sâo?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/s%C3%A2o

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, “Sâo”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Sâo parses inside a full name →