Names of Macao MO
DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names) records 志強 as the commonest given name in Macao and 陳 as the commonest surname; the names that most distinguish Macao from the rest of the world are 李, Park and 何.
Written in Chinese, Portuguese.
- Population
- 614K
- Official registers
- 5
- Name forms recorded
- 706
Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.
The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.
How names work in Macao
6 naming traditions are in use in Macao, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.
The most common names in Macao
Where the two lists disagree
10 of DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names)'s top 10 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.
Characteristic of Macao
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Macao holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.
Scripts & spelling
Names in Macao are written in Latin (73%), Hangul (15%) and Han (12%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.
Countries whose names look alike
Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.
Registers & sources
Official registers
Statistics and Census Service of Macao SAR (DSEC). Counts: residents. given and surname. 99 forms. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
DSEC NameStatistic tool. Top-20 Macau surnames (百家姓) WITH COUNTS (陳 74,612 ...) + ranks 21-99, and top-10 all-Macau most-common given names WITH COUNTS (志強 1,472 ...). Aggregate over resident population. Scraped via Firecrawl (JS-rendered). SWEEP 2026-08-06: re-checked dsec.gov.mo/NameStatistic/ specifically for a free-text per-name query box (as opposed to the top-20/top-10 tables already catalogued here) — could not confirm one exists (direct fetch returned blank/404 in this environment); the prior Firecrawl scrape captured only the ranked top-N tables. Treat as list_coverage=top_n only unless a search box is separately confirmed.
Last verified 2026-06-09.
- This page provides statistics on popular names in Macau published by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).2023not a population count
www.dsec.gov.mo. Counts: not recorded. given. 5 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page provides statistics on popular names in Macau published by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- 《2026热门名字排行榜》由NameChef发布，统计各地名字的流行程度。2026not a population count
www.namechef.co. Counts: not recorded. given. 19 forms. 2026. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. 《2026热门名字排行榜》由NameChef发布，统计各地名字的流行程度。
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- An article discussing popular names in Macau, published by Sohu.2023not a population count
www.sohu.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 2 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. An article discussing popular names in Macau, published by Sohu.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- This page discusses the history and associations of surname clans in Macau, published by Revista Macau.2016not a population count
www.revistamacau.com.mo. Counts: not recorded. surname. 1 forms. 2016. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page discusses the history and associations of surname clans in Macau, published by Revista Macau.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
Cited works
Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.
- Chinese nameencyclopaedia
- Goody Feedweb
- Hokkienencyclopaedia
- Hong Kong – Naming, Cultural Atlasweb
- Hongkonger nameencyclopaedia
- Jyutpingencyclopaedia
- Learn Dialect SGweb
- List of common Chinese surnamesencyclopaedia
- My China Rootsweb
- My China Rootsweb
- Romanization of Wu Chineseencyclopaedia
- SAYSweb
- Teochew peopleencyclopaedia
- Wu (surname)encyclopaedia
- Zhuang (surname)encyclopaedia
- Zhuang peopleencyclopaedia
- Zhuang surnamesweb
About this data
Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.
Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.
Questions
- What is the most common given name in Macao?
- 志強, according to DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names), with 1,472 bearers recorded.
- What is the most common surname in Macao?
- 陳, according to DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names), with 74,612 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Macao?
- Because they count different people. DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is 志強. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Kin. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Macao?
- No — 6 are described on this page (Chinese, Cantonese and Hong Kong, Hokkien and Min, Wu and Shanghainese, Zhuang, Portuguese), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Macao”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/MO (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from DSEC Macau — Name Statistics (百家姓 surnames + common given names).