For the more common surname Wáng, written 王, see
Wang (surname).
Wāng (汪) is a
Chinese surname. It was 104th of the Hundred Family Surnames poem, contained in the verse
Yáo,
Shào,
Zhàn, Wāng (姚邵湛汪). In 2013, the Fuxi Cultural Association found the name to be the 60th most common in China, being shared by around 4.83 million people or 0.360% of the population, with the province with the largest population being
Anhui. Another study found it to be the 58th-most-common surname[when?] in mainland China.[citation needed]
It is also Wong in Cantonese, Ong or Ang in Hokkien, Waung or Vong in American English, and Ō or Oh in Japanese. However, in Vietnamese, it is written Uông.
Wāng was listed by the NCIIS survey as the 58th most common surname in mainland China[1] and by Yang Xuxian as the 76th most common surname on Taiwan.[2]
Origins of Wāng
汪 means "vast" in the Chinese language, and is often used to describe oceans. In the modern
vernacular Chinese, it is also the
onomatopoeia for the sound of a
barking dog. Baxter and Sagart reconstructed it as *qʷˤaŋ and 'wang, respectively.[3]
It was originally a shortening of Wang Mang (汪芒), or Wang Wang (汪罔), name of a state in present-day
Deqing County, Zhejiang. After it was conquered by a neighboring state, its inhabitants fled and the surname was shortened to Wang (汪).[4]
A town called
Tangwangchuan in
Gansu had a multi-ethnic populace, the
Tang (唐) and Wāng families predominating. The Tang and Wang families were originally of non-Muslim Han extraction, but by the Twentieth Century some branches of the families had become Muslim by intermarriage or conversion.[6]
Notable people
Wang Jingwei (汪精衞) former Kuomintang officer and later Japanese collaborator
This page lists people with the
surnameWāng. If an
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