Names of Taiwan TW

RIS/MOI — Household Registration Statistics (surnames + given names) records 陳 as the commonest surname in Taiwan; the names that most distinguish Taiwan from the rest of the world are 李, 徐 and 江.

Written in Chinese.

Population
24M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
24K
ABuilt from 2 official registers (2023), 24,479 name forms in our corpus, 17 cited works.

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.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Taiwan are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Taiwan included.

How names work in Taiwan

5 naming traditions are in use in Taiwan, 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 Taiwan

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2
全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis, 2023 — 100 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1淑芬32K—
2淑惠30K—
3美玲27K—
4麗華26K—
5美惠25K—
6淑貞24K—
7雅婷23K—
8秀英23K—
9淑娟23K—
10秀琴22K—
11秀美21K—
12美華21K—
13怡君20K—
14淑華20K—
15美玉20K—
16雅惠19K—
17秀蘭18K—
18淑美18K—
19秀鳳18K—
20美珠18K—

Where the two lists disagree

25 of 全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis's top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis 2023Across all records淑芬: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. 淑芬not ranked淑惠: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. 淑惠not ranked美玲: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. 美玲not ranked麗華: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. 麗華not ranked美惠: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. 美惠not ranked淑貞: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. 淑貞not ranked雅婷: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. 雅婷not ranked秀英: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. 秀英not ranked淑娟: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. 淑娟not ranked秀琴: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. 秀琴not ranked秀美: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. 秀美not ranked美華: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. 美華not ranked怡君: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. 怡君not ranked淑華: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. 淑華not ranked美玉: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. 美玉not ranked雅惠: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. 雅惠not ranked秀蘭: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. 秀蘭not ranked淑美: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. 淑美not ranked秀鳳: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. 秀鳳not ranked美珠: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. 美珠not ranked麗珠: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. 麗珠not ranked麗娟: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. 麗娟not ranked淑玲: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. 淑玲not ranked美雲: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. 美雲not ranked雅雯: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. 雅雯not ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis, 2023 on the left; every record we hold for Taiwan on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

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 Taiwan

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Taiwan 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.

路文男明山Taiwan成水富松玉仁源惠福全正平英花梅秀瑞嘉月宇新玲慧婷春敏智力宏怡芳海君佳俊建子燕容小雪青威博家星天先生如生琳欣世翔
Sized by how much of the difference between Taiwan's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Names in Taiwan are written in Han (89%) and Latin (11%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

李surname●
徐surname●
江surname●
何surname●
路given name●
The best-attested names in Taiwan, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

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

  • RIS/MOI — Household Registration Statistics (surnames + given names)2023headline (surnames)

    Department of Household Registration (戶政司), Ministry of Interior. Counts: residents. surname. 2,712 forms. 2023. Licence: Government Open Data License.

    What we know about this register

    2,731 surnames. Year 112 (ROC) = CE 2023. Columns: 年度 (ROC year), ranking, lastname (surname), age (0~14/15~64/65+), 人口數 (count). Aggregate age groups for total per surname. Given names accessible only via interactive portal.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • 全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis2023headline (given)

    Ministry of the Interior, Dept. of Household Registration (戶政司). Counts: residents. given and surname. 1,767 forms. 2023. Licence: Government Open Data.

    What we know about this register

    MOI Household Registration name statistics, data as of 2023-06-30 (民國112年). Extracted 1,785 ranked surnames with bearer counts (表五十七, 計 column) + top-100 given names per sex (表五十一). Whole-population counts. Closes the given-name gap (prior tw-ris-surnames was surnames-only; given names were portal-only). 1,985 rows. Traditional Chinese, no romanization in source.

    Last verified 2026-05-28.

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.

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 Taiwan?
淑芬, according to 全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis (2023), with 31,879 bearers recorded among girls.
What is the most common surname in Taiwan?
陳, according to RIS/MOI — Household Registration Statistics (surnames + given names) (2023), with 2,618,994 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Taiwan?
Because they count different people. 全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis (2023) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is 淑芬. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is 文. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Taiwan?
No — 5 are described on this page (Chinese, Cantonese and Hong Kong, Hokkien and Min, Wu and Shanghainese, Zhuang), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Taiwan”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/TW (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from RIS/MOI — Household Registration Statistics (surnames + given names); 全國姓名統計分析 — National Name Statistical Analysis.