Tao
陶 — Táo
The 84th most common surname in China
About 2.74 million people in mainland China, 0.21% of the population, most numerous in Anhui (Yuan Yida 袁义达 and Qiu Jiaru 邱家儒, 中国四百大姓, 2013).
Where the name comes from
Two lines feed the name, both to do with clay. Emperor Yao's clan name was Taotang (陶唐氏), and descendants kept the 陶 from it; separately Yu Si (虞思) served the Zhou kings as táozhèng (陶正), the officer in charge of making pottery, and his descendants took that office as a surname. A third line descends from Fan Li, who retired to Dingtao (定陶), and later some Tang (唐) families switched to Tao to avoid the naming taboo on Shi Jingtang, founding emperor of the Later Jin.
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 陶.
- TaoMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- ToCantonese — Hong Kong
- TouCantonese — Macau
- Toh / Tho / TowMin Nan — Malaysia and Singapore
- ĐàoVietnamese
- TauTeochew — Singapore and Malaysia
The character
Outside a name, 陶 is an ordinary word meaning pottery.
- Strokes
- 10
- Radical
- 阝
- As a word
- táo
Words built from 陶
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.