Yâm
surname · Latin script
Yâm is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Portuguese inhame and Spanish ñame, likely from Wolof ñàmbi (“cassava”) or a related word. The term was spelled yam as early as 1657. Doublet of name.
- USUnited States1 in 184K(measured from records)
- INIndia1 in 448K
- NLNetherlands1 in 617K
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.
- India (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 257 (measured from records)
- 1 in 184K (inferred from the name graph)
2,960 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Yam in US United States, IN India, HK Hong Kong and 1 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)- Portugueseinhame(measured from records)
- Wolofñàmbi“cassava”(measured from records)
From Portuguese inhame and Spanish ñame, likely from Wolof ñàmbi (“cassava”) or a related word. The term was spelled yam as early as 1657. Doublet of name.
Cited for this meaning 3
- Digital Pāḷi Dictionary
- Wiktionary
- Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (1972)
Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Yâm 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | — | 2,960 | 1 in 448K | 3K | Yam | 30 |
| US United States | — | 1,808 | 1 in 184K | 1.9K | Yam | 257 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 28 | 1 in 617K | 28 | Yam | 11 |
| PL Poland | — | 9 | 1 in 4.3M | 65 | — | 1 |
| NO Norway | — | 8 | 1 in 683K | 20 | — | 2 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 3 | 1 in 2.8M | 3 | — | 6 |
| HK Hong Kong | #290 | — | — | — | Yam | 76 |
2,960 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)Yâm 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 syk, water
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.
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Yâm mean, and where does it come from?
- From Portuguese inhame and Spanish ñame, likely from Wolof ñàmbi (“cassava”) or a related word. The term was spelled yam as early as 1657. Doublet of name. Recorded by Digital Pāḷi Dictionary and Wiktionary and 1 other source.
- In which country does Yâm have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 3.0 thousand people named Yâm, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled yam.
- Where is Yâm most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Yâm is densest in the United States — about 1 in 184 thousand people — even though India holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Yâm?
- In India, the national register counted 2,960 people named Yâm, about 1 in 448 thousand residents.
- How common is Yâm compared with other names?
- In Hong Kong, Yâm is the 290th most common surname of 8,142 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Yâm?
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/y%C3%A2mThe 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, “Yâm” — the 290th most common surname in Hong Kong. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.