Hu
胡 — Hú
The 15th most common surname in China
15th most common surname in mainland China (Ministry of Public Security national name report for 2019, released January 2020). An earlier figure of 13.7 million bearers in 2013 comes from Bloomberg's "Most Common in China: Surnames" dataset, as cited by English Wikipedia.
Where the name comes from
The oldest line runs from Gui Man (媯滿), whom King Wu of Zhou enfeoffed with the state of Chen and who is remembered by his posthumous title Duke Hu of Chen; his descendants took Hu as their name. Two small Zhou vassal states were also called Hu — one near modern Luohe in Henan, the other near Fuyang in Anhui. A third route was administrative: in the sinicisation of Xianbei names decreed in 496, the clan name Hegu (紇骨) was rewritten as Hu.
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 胡.
- HuMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- WuCantonese — Hong Kong and Guangdong
- WooCantonese — Hong Kong and Guangdong
The character
Outside a name, 胡 is an ordinary word meaning non-Han people, esp. from central Asia.
- Strokes
- 9
- Radical
- ⺼
- As a word
- hú
Words built from 胡
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.