Ya-O
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Ya-O is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't.
- USUnited States1 in 46K(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 33K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 33K
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)
- Sources
- 379 (measured from records)
- 1 in 33K (inferred from the name graph)
7,192 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Yao in US United States, GH Ghana.
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)
Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't.
Sources 5
- A Handbook of African Names
- 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
- Wiktionary
- Chinese Surnames Encyclopedia (Section 2)
- The book of African names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ya-O 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 7,192 | 1 in 46K | 11K | Yao | 379 |
| ES Spain | — | 899 | 1 in 56K | 899 | — | 30 |
| AR Argentina | — | 440 | 1 in 103K | 440 | — | — |
| IN India | — | 261 | 1 in 5.1M | 261 | — | 21 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 254 | 1 in 33K | 254 | — | 17 |
| SE Sweden | — | 217 | 1 in 47K | 217 | — | 21 |
| FI Finland | — | 169 | 1 in 33K | 169 | — | 5 |
| NO Norway | — | 106 | 1 in 52K | 106 | — | 7 |
| GH Ghana | #317 | — | — | — | Yao | 55 |
7,192 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 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Ya-O mean, and where does it come from?
- Possible back-formation from yaon when contracted with 'y or 't. Recorded by A Handbook of African Names and 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples) and 3 other sources.
- In which country does Ya-O have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 7.2 thousand people named Ya-O, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled yao.
- Where is Ya-O most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Ya-O is densest in Finland — about 1 in 33 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Ya-O?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,192 people named Ya-O in 2010, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.
- How common is Ya-O compared with other names?
- In Ghana, Ya-O is the 317th most common surname of 36,883 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Ya-O?
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/ya-oThe 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, “Ya-O” — the 317th most common surname in Ghana. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.