Thái
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Tên phái Phật trong Cao Đài; dùng làm yếu tố đầu của nam giáo phẩm
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/tʰaj˦˥/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Thái is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Vietnam than in any other country, where it is the 25th most common surname.
- VNVietnam≈1 in 640(inferred from the name graph)
- MYMalaysia≈1 in 13K
- USUnited States1 in 29K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Vietnam (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 191 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 640 (inferred from the name graph)
≈150,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Vietnam, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Thai in VN Vietnam, US United States, MY Malaysia and 3 more.
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)
Tên phái Phật trong Cao Đài; dùng làm yếu tố đầu của nam giáo phẩm.
Sources 1
- Tên Họ Người Việt Nam
Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Thái 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VN Vietnam | #25 | ≈150,000 est. | ≈1 in 640 | listed | Thai | 191 |
| KH Cambodia | — | ≈18,000 est. | ≈1 in 947 | — | Thai | 40 |
| US United States | — | 11,644 | 1 in 29K | 13K | Thai | 153 |
| CN China | — | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 131K | — | Thai | 12 |
| MY Malaysia | #878 | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Thai | 55 |
| SG Singapore | — | ≈240 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Thai | 23 |
| NO Norway | — | 228 | 1 in 24K | 228 | — | 10 |
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: the vn-kaggle-surname register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Thái 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, Oyster Pearl
as a nameVietnamese Personal Names (CIA Foreign Names Studies, ch. 37)
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)
- Cai Lunb. 48CNnot in their usual nameChinese official credited with inventing paper (died 121)
- Cai Yuanpeib. 1868CNnot in their usual nameChinese educator, Esperantist and the president of Peking University (1868-1940)
- Cai Qib. 1955CNnot in their usual nameFirst Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party
- Tsai Ing-wenb. 1956TWnot in their usual name14th and 15th President of Republic of China (Taiwan)
- Tsai Ming-liangb. 1957MYnot in their usual nameMalaysian-Taiwanese filmmaker (born 1957)
- Amy Chuab. 1962USnot in their usual nameAmerican law professor and writer (born 1962)
- Jolin Tsaib. 1980TWnot in their usual nameTaiwanese singer, songwriter, and actress (born 1980)
- Charlene Choib. 1982CAnot in their usual nameHong Kong actress and singer
- Lauren Tsaib. 1998USnot in their usual nameChinese–American model and illustrator
- Albert Tsaib. 2004USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor (born 2004)
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 13 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VN Vietnam | Vietnamese surnames (Kaggle) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- How do you pronounce Thái?
- A machine transcription gives /tʰaj˦˥/ (IPA) for Vietnamese.
- What does the name Thái mean?
- Recorded meaning: Tên phái Phật trong Cao Đài; dùng làm yếu tố đầu của nam giáo phẩm.
- In which country does Thái have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 154 thousand people named Thái in Vietnam, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled thai.
- How common is the name Thái?
- In the United States, the national register counted 11,644 people named Thái in 2010, about 1 in 29 thousand residents.
- How common is Thái compared with other names?
- In Vietnam, Thái is the 25th most common surname of 62,915 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Thái?
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/th%C3%A1iThe 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, “Thái” — the 25th most common surname in Vietnam. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.