Where the name comes from
When King Wu of Zhou parcelled out fiefs after overthrowing the Shang, he gave his second son, known as Yu Shu (邘叔), the state of Yu (邘) at what is now Qinyang in Henan; the descendants took the state's name and dropped the 邑 radical to write it 于. An older strand is recorded too: a son of the Shang king Wu Ding was enfeoffed as the "Marquis of Yu". A third stream is the Wanniuyu (萬忸于) clan — Shandong Yu people who had taken a Xianbei form of the name and later returned to writing it plainly as 于.
The same name, spelled differently
A Chinese surname is a character, not a spelling. The Latin letters on a passport come from whichever dialect the name was written down from — so these are all 于.
- YuMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- YuCantonese — Hong Kong
- UCantonese — Macau
- VuVietnamese (rare in Vietnam)
The character
Outside a name, 于 is an ordinary word meaning to go.
- Strokes
- 3
- Radical
- 二
- Traditional
- 於
- As a word
- yú
Words built from 于
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.
Other surnames read “Yu”
Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.