Mo
莫 — Mò
The 97th most common surname in China
"In 2004, there were an estimated 73,000 people with the surname of Mo abroad and 1,540,000 Mos in China" (English Wikipedia); it ranks 168th in the Hundred Family Surnames
Where the name comes from
The name is an abbreviation of a city name. Descendants of the legendary ruler Zhuanxu shortened the name of his city, Moyangcheng (莫陽城), to its first character and took it as their surname. The character 莫 itself carries the senses "evening" and "do not".
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 莫.
- MoMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- MokCantonese — Hong Kong (e.g. the singer Karen Mok)
- MạcVietnamese
The character
Outside a name, 莫 is an ordinary word meaning do not.
- Strokes
- 10
- Radical
- 艹
- As a word
- mò
Words built from 莫
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.