Hao
郝 — Hǎo
The 87th most common surname in China
About 2.64 million people in mainland China, 0.20% of the population, most numerous in Hebei (Yuan Yida 袁义达 and Qiu Jiaru 邱家儒, 中国四百大姓, 2013); an earlier ranking put it at 2.7 million and 82nd (中国最新300大姓排名, Taiwan.cn, 2008 data, published 2009).
Where the name comes from
The founding story is a Shang-dynasty grant: King Di Yi gave his son Qi (期) a settlement called Haoxiang (郝鄉), and the family took the place-name as their surname. Sources disagree on where Haoxiang stood — Zhouzhi in Shaanxi, or the Taiyuan area of Shanxi — but Taiyuan became the clan's ancestral seat (郡望) and the centre it spread from. Other Hao lines are traced to the Wuhuan people and to non-Han groups of the ancient south.
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 郝.
- HaoMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- KokCantonese — Hong Kong and Macau
- Hok / HakMin Nan — Malaysia and Singapore
- HácVietnamese
The character
Outside a name, 郝 is an ordinary word meaning a place in Shanxi province.
- Strokes
- 9
- Radical
- 阝
- As a word
- hǎo