Wang
汪 — Wāng
The 59th most common surname in China
About 4.83 million people, 0.36% of the population, ranked 60th, with more Wāng in Anhui than in any other province (Yuan Yida and Qiu Jiaru, survey of China's 400 largest surnames, Fuxi Institution, 2013); 59th most common surname in mainland China in the Ministry of Public Security's 2019 national name report.
Where the name comes from
Usually derived from Wangmang (汪芒), also written Wangwang (汪罔), an ancient state in what is now Deqing County, Zhejiang. After a neighbouring state conquered it the inhabitants fled and shortened the name to the single character Wang (汪). A second account derives the surname instead from the ancestral surname Jiang (姜).
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 汪.
- WangMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- WongCantonese — Hong Kong, Macau
- OngHokkien — Fujian, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines
- AngHokkien — the Philippines
- VongHakka
- UôngSino-Vietnamese — Vietnam
- Whang / WaonWu — Shanghai region
The character
Outside a name, 汪 is an ordinary word meaning vast, extensive, deep.
- Strokes
- 7
- Radical
- 氵
- As a word
- wāng
Words built from 汪
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.
Other surnames read “Wang”
Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.