Names of Vietnam VN

Surnames in Vietnam are inherited, but drawn from a stock small enough that a few cover much of the population; the names that most distinguish Vietnam from the rest of the world are Thi, Trần and Thanh.

Written in Vietnamese.

Population: 99M
Official registers: 6
Name forms recorded: 8.6K

BBuilt from 6 official registers, 8,590 name forms in our corpus.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share

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

How names work in Vietnam

Names in Vietnam follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

VietnameseHow these names work →

The most common names in Vietnam

Characteristic of Vietnam

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

Sized by how much of the difference between Vietnam's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

The best-attested names in Vietnam, 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.

The Latin alphabet here is not the ASCII one. Stripping diacritics merges names that are not the same name and changes how they are pronounced, and a record that has been ASCII-folded has lost information no amount of guessing recovers.

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

Vietnamese Surname Corpus — academic citation compilation1984not a population count
Nguyễn Văn Dung (2003), "Tên riêng trong tiếng Việt và trong tiếng Pháp", VNU Journal of Foreign Studies XIX(1):35-44, citing Lê Trung Hoa (1992) and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1975); Pierre Gourou (pre-1945 survey, cited in the same paper). Counts: not recorded. surname. 4 forms. 1984. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Static compiled list of ~40 most frequent Vietnamese surnames with approximate bearer counts derived from known percentage distributions applied to 97M population (2023). Vietnamese surname space is extremely concentrated: top 14 surnames account for ~90% of the population. Source is a corpus compilation, not a registry dataset — counts are approximate. Nguyễn alone accounts for ~38% of the population. STATUS CORRECTED 2026-07-25: was marked normalized but no rows exist under source_id=vn-surname-corpus in official/normalized/ — extraction is not present in the official layer. Downgraded to known.
Last verified 2026-07-25.
The page provides information about common surnames in Vietnam and names that are banned for registration, published by2025not a population count
baomoi.com. Counts: not recorded. surname. 14 forms. 2025. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Baomoi.com (Vietnamese news aggregator) article on common surnames and banned registration names; 14-row parquet has counts (Nguyễn=384, Trần=121, Lê=95, Phạm=70) that are implausibly tiny for Vietnam national data (Nguyễn alone has ~37M bearers). These appear to be illustrative editorial numbers, not statistical frequency data. vn-surname-corpus is the preferred source.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
The page provides an analysis of the performance of Vietnamese surname lists in identifying Vietnamese individuals for r2012not a population count
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Counts: not recorded. surname. 11 forms. 2012. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 2011 paper on using Vietnamese surname lists to identify Vietnamese individuals in US research populations; 17-row parquet has counts (Nguyen=1228, Tran=496, Le=319) — sample sizes from a US Vietnamese diaspora study, not Vietnam national frequency data. vn-surname-corpus is the preferred source.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
This page is a comprehensive guide to Vietnamese last names published by Vietnam Teaching Jobs, offering insights into tnot a population count
vietnamteachingjobs.com. Counts: not recorded. surname. 10 forms. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Vietnam Teaching Jobs (ESL job board) blog on Vietnamese surname cultural significance; 10-row parquet has tiny counts (Nguyễn=38, Trần=12, Lê=10) — editorial blog post, not statistical frequency data. vn-surname-corpus is the preferred source.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
The page describes the significance and prevalence of Vietnamese last names, published by Vinpearl.2024not a population count
vinpearl.com. Counts: not recorded. surname. 10 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Vinpearl (Vietnamese resort/hotel chain) blog on Vietnamese surname prevalence; 14-row parquet has identical counts to vn-disc-baomoi-com (Nguyễn=384, Trần=121, Lê=95, Phạm=70) — republication of same data from a hospitality brand blog, not a primary statistical source.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
The article discusses the popularity of the surname 'Nguyễn' among Vietnamese people, published by Vietcetera.2021not a population count
vietcetera.com. Counts: not recorded. surname. 4 forms. 2021. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Vietcetera article specifically about the Nguyễn surname's prevalence; 4-row parquet has 3 surnames with count=0 and Nguyễn with 39M (total population stock estimate, not birth count) — not a name frequency dataset.
Last verified 2026-05-12.

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.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Vietnam”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/VN (data snapshot 2026-09-12).