# Ng Surname: Meaning, Origin, and Why Wu and Ng Are the Same Name

> Ng is the Chinese surname with no vowels. It is usually 吴 (Wu), a name founded by a prince who refused a throne, but not always. Here is how to tell.

Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-surnames/wu  
Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about  
Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources

Ng and Wu are the same Chinese surname, 吴, the ninth most common in China and carried by
more than twenty million people. Ng is what the name sounds like in Cantonese, where the
whole thing is one hummed consonant with no vowel in it anywhere, which makes it the
Chinese surname most often followed by the question "sorry, how do you say that?"

The answer has two halves, and the second one is better than the first. The name came from
a kingdom on the Yangtze delta. The kingdom was founded by a prince who ran away from a
throne on purpose, and Confucius, writing centuries later, called it the finest thing
anyone had ever done.

## Spellings heading

One name, six spellings, and no vowels in the busiest one

A Chinese surname reaches the Latin alphabet in whatever language its family was speaking
on the day somebody wrote it down, which is why the spelling of a Chinese name is really a
record of a departure. Wu's map has an extra complication the others do not: its most
common overseas spelling contains no vowel at all, and it is shared with a completely
different surname.

Geography sorts the rest. Wu is heaviest in the south: the 2013 national survey found more
bearers in Guangdong than in any other province, which is exactly why the Cantonese
spelling, not the Mandarin one, is the one the English-speaking world keeps meeting. On
the [full surname map](/chinese-surnames) that puts Wu in the same southern column as
[Chen](/chinese-surnames/chen), well away from the northern giants.

## A name with no vowels in it

Ng is not a typo, an abbreviation, or a form somebody filled in wrong. It is a complete
Chinese surname, spelled exactly as it sounds, and the reason it looks impossible in English
is that English does not believe a consonant can be a syllable on its own. Cantonese does.
The sound at the end of "sing" is, in Cantonese, a thing you can say by itself, hold, and
give a tone to, and that hum is the whole name.

So the pronunciation is easier than the spelling suggests. Say "sing" and stop before you
finish. Now say only the part you stopped on, and let the pitch rise a little, the way an
English speaker's voice rises at the end of a question. Done. You have said a name that
about two percent of China answers to.

English-speaking countries have spent two centuries failing to write this down. Ng gets
pronounced "eng," "ing," or "uhng" by people doing their genuine best, and the surname has
sprouted a family of surrender spellings to help them: Ang, Eng, Ing, and Ong in the United
States, Ung in Australia. Each one is the same name with a vowel bolted on for the benefit
of a clerk. The vowelless original survives anyway, mostly in Hong Kong, and it turns up
regularly on lists of English words with no vowels, sandwiched between "hmm" and "tsktsk"
as though it were a noise rather than several million people.

## Which Ng are you?

Here is where the tidy story ends. Ng is the Cantonese spelling of 吴, and it is also the
Cantonese spelling of 伍, an entirely separate surname. Cantonese keeps them apart by tone,
the way English keeps "record" the noun apart from "record" the verb, but tone does not
survive the trip into Latin letters. Both arrive as Ng.

Hokkien makes it worse, or better, depending on how you feel about your own name being a
puzzle. In Hokkien communities across Malaysia and Singapore, Ng is the usual spelling of
黄 (Huang) and sometimes of 阮 (Ruan). Which means a Ng from Kowloon and a Ng from Penang
can share a passport spelling, a checkout queue, and absolutely no character at all.

The oldest illustration of the problem is sitting inside this surname's own founding
document. The *Records of the Grand Historian*, the first-century-BC history that gives Wu
its earliest account, ends the kingdom of Wu with its last king falling on his sword and
saying he regretted not taking Zixu's advice. Zixu is Wu Zixu, the adviser he had forced to
kill himself a few years earlier. In English the two men look like relatives. In Chinese the
king is a 吴 and the adviser is a 伍, and they were never the same name for a moment.

A third character muddies the English side without touching the Cantonese one: 武, the
surname of the empress Wu Zetian, is also spelled Wu and has nothing to do with either. If
you are tracing a family, the useful question is never "how do you spell it." It is "which
character is it," and the answer is one of the few things every Chinese family reliably
knows about itself.

## The character is a shout

Open the *Shuowen Jiezi*, the dictionary Xu Shen finished around 100 CE and the baseline for
any question about where a Chinese character came from, and the entry for 吴 does something
unusual. It gives the surname first, the district second, and only then, as a third sense,
the word's actual meaning: big speech. Duan Yucai, the Qing scholar whose commentary is
still the standard companion to the dictionary, glosses that briskly. Big speech, he says,
means a racket.

You can see it in the parts. The character is a mouth sitting on top of a figure with its
head thrown back and to one side. Read the bronze-inscription form and the picture is a
person shouting straight at someone loudly enough that the listener flinches and turns
away. Not a word for a place, or a virtue, or a tree. A word for volume.

The modern simplified shape has quietly lost the joke. In 吴 the lower half now looks
exactly like the character for sky, which invites the very reasonable and completely wrong
reading of "a mouth under heaven." The bottom half is not sky. It is the tilted man,
flattened by three thousand years of people writing quickly, and the seven strokes you write
today are a picture of somebody yelling.

## The prince who refused a kingdom

The kingdom came later, and it came from a refusal.

Sima Qian tells it at the top of chapter 31 of the *Records of the Grand Historian*, and
where he tells it matters as much as what he says. Chapter 31 is the first of the hereditary
houses, the section of the history reserved for the great families, and Sima Qian gave the
opening slot not to the largest state or the richest but to this one.

The story: Taibo and his brother Zhongyong were the eldest sons of the Zhou king, and by
every rule of succession the throne was Taibo's. Their youngest brother Jili had a son named
Chang who was obviously, embarrassingly brilliant, and their father wanted the line to run
through him. So the two elder brothers left. They went southeast into country the court
considered wild, tattooed their bodies and cut their hair in the local style, and by doing
so made themselves ritually ineligible to rule anything in the north. It was not a sulk. It
was a legal maneuver conducted with a knife. Taibo took the name Gouwu, and Sima Qian
records that more than a thousand families thought so well of it that they came over and
made him their lord.

Chang grew up to become King Wen, whose son founded the Zhou dynasty. The greatest dynasty
of the Chinese classical age exists because two men walked away.

Confucius, five centuries on, gave the verdict that fixed Taibo in the Chinese moral
imagination. In the *Analects*, in the chapter that carries his name, the passage runs in
James Legge's translation: "Tai Bo may be said to have reached the highest point of virtuous
action. Thrice he declined the kingdom, and the people in ignorance of his motives could not
express their approbation of his conduct." The sting is in the second half. He gave up
everything and then arranged it so that nobody could even praise him for it.

His kingdom, in the delta around modern Suzhou, lasted until 473 BC, when Yue overran it and
its last king killed himself. The name outlived the state by two and a half millennia and
then some: 吴 still labels the whole language of the region, Wu Chinese, spoken by around
eighty-three million people in Shanghai, Zhejiang, and southern Jiangsu. A prince gave up a
throne, and the compensation was a language.

## Five lives of the name

Twenty million bearers over three thousand years produce a strange guest list. Here are
five, and two of them are opposites.

### The painter who walked into the wall

Wu Daozi, who worked in the eighth century and is still called the Sage of Painting, was the
most admired brush in the Tang dynasty. Not one of his paintings survives. Everything
attributed to him is a later copy or a stone engraving made from his design, so his
reputation rests entirely on what people who saw the originals said afterward, which is a
peculiar kind of fame. The story they liked best has him finishing a landscape for Emperor
Xuanzong, remarking that a spirit lived in the cave he had just painted, clapping his hands,
walking into the cave, and vanishing along with the entire mural. It is told as a legend and
should be read as one. It is also, as a way of describing what a painter can do to a wall,
hard to improve on.

### The man who probably wrote Monkey

*Journey to the West*, the sixteenth-century novel that gave the world the Monkey King, was
published anonymously in 1592 and stayed that way for centuries. In the early twentieth
century the scholar Hu Shih argued for Wu Cheng'en, a minor official from Huai'an in
Jiangsu, on the strength of a 1625 local gazetteer crediting him with something called
*Journey to the West*. Others have pushed back hard, pointing out that the gazetteer never
says the something was a novel. Anthony C. Yu, who spent decades producing the standard
English translation, put it as carefully as it can be put: Wu is the most likely author, and
the authorship remains unclear. Which is worth saying plainly, because a great many pages
will tell you flatly that he wrote it. What is not in doubt is the book, and
[Sun Wukong](/chinese-mythology/wukong) has outlived every argument about who is responsible
for him.

### The general who opened the gate

Then there is the mirror image of Taibo. On 22 May 1644, Wu Sangui commanded the Ming
garrison at the Shanhai Pass, the fortress where the Great Wall meets the sea and the only
convenient door into China from the northeast. Beijing had just fallen to the rebel Li
Zicheng, who was holding Wu's family. Wu opened the gate and let the Manchu army through,
and the Qing dynasty walked into China behind them. The Qing made him Prince Who Pacifies
the West and gave him Yunnan and Guizhou to govern; he
rebelled against them in 1673 anyway, declared himself emperor in 1678, and died a few
months later with his rebellion collapsing around him. The surname begins with a man who
gave away a kingdom to keep faith and includes a man who gave away a kingdom to break it.

### The king who shut it again

In 938 a Vietnamese commander named Ngô Quyền, whose surname is this character read in
Vietnamese, met a Southern Han invasion fleet at the mouth of the Bạch Đằng river. He had
iron-tipped stakes driven into the riverbed at low tide, lured the fleet upstream on the
high water, and waited. The falling tide impaled the ships, and hundreds of them burned. The
victory ended roughly a thousand years of Chinese rule over Vietnam, begun under the Han in
111 BC, and Ngô Quyền founded a dynasty of his own. One 吴 opened a wall; another closed a
river.

### The Goh who ran a country

Goh Chok Tong spells the name the Hokkien way, as his parents' generation did in the Minnan
region of Fujian before the family sailed south. He was prime minister of Singapore from
November 1990 to August 2004, the man who followed Lee Kuan Yew, which is not the easiest
fourteen years anyone has ever been handed, and stayed on as Senior Minister until 2011.
The spelling is
the point here as much as the man: a Goh, an Ng, and a Wu can be three cousins whose
grandparents took three different boats.

## If you carry the name

The surname is the half of a Chinese name you inherit; the given name is the half somebody
chose. If you are an Ng, a Wu, a Goh, or an Ngô picking a Chinese given name to stand beside
the family character, our [name generator](/chinese-name) builds real ones the way Chinese
parents do, from meaning and sound rather than from a list. And the character itself has
been worth looking at since it was a shout scratched into bronze:
[the calligraphy tool renders 吴 live](/chinese-calligraphy?c=吴), free.

## Spellings

- Wu · Mandarin (pinyin) · Mainland China, Taiwan, recent emigrants · The standard romanization, pronounced "woo" on a rising tone, like a question.

- Ng · Cantonese, Hakka · Hong Kong, Macau, the older Guangdong diaspora · One consonant, no vowel, one whole syllable. Cantonese also spells the unrelated surname 伍 this way.

- Goh / Go / Ngoh · Hokkien, Teochew · Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines · The Fujian-coast sound. Singapore's second prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, spells it this way.

- Woo · Shanghainese · Shanghai and the Jiangnan delta · The reading of the delta the name originally came from.

- Ngô · Vietnamese · Vietnam · The same character in Vietnamese. The king who ended a thousand years of Chinese rule was one.

- Oh / O · Korean (오) · Korea · The Korean reading of the character, and one of Korea's larger surnames.

## FAQ

**How do you pronounce the surname Ng?**

Hum the sound at the end of the English word "sing," hold it for a beat, and let the pitch rise slightly. That is the entire name. Ng is a syllabic nasal, a consonant doing a vowel's job, which is why it needs no vowel letter to be spelled. English speakers who cannot manage a naked consonant usually land on "eng," "ing," or "uhng," and every Ng alive has heard all three. In Mandarin the same character is Wú, pronounced "woo" on a rising tone.

**Are Ng and Wu the same surname?**

Usually yes, and the exception is worth knowing. Ng is the Cantonese spelling of 吴 (Wu), the ninth most common surname in China. But Cantonese also spells the separate surname 伍 as Ng, and Hokkien speakers use Ng for 黄 (Huang) and 阮 (Ruan). So a Hong Kong Ng and a Penang Ng may carry entirely different characters. The spelling cannot tell you; the character can, and every family knows which one is theirs.

**What does the surname Wu mean?**

As a family name it means a place, not a word. Wu was a kingdom on the Yangtze delta, in today's Jiangsu, and its people kept its name after Yue destroyed it in 473 BC. The character does carry an old word meaning of its own, though it is not the one people guess: the Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, lists 吴 as a surname, then as a district, then as a word for loud speech. The character is built from a mouth and a figure with its head thrown back. It started life as a shout.

**Is Ng a Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean surname?**

It is Chinese, and it is also Vietnamese and Korean, because all three write the same character. In Vietnam 吴 is read Ngô, and Ngô Quyền used it in 938 when he broke the Southern Han fleet at the Bạch Đằng river and ended roughly a thousand years of Chinese rule. In Korea it is read Oh or O, written 오. A Ngô in Hanoi, an Oh in Seoul, and an Ng in Kowloon may all be spelling one character in three different mouths.

**How common is the surname Wu?**

Ninth in China. The Ministry of Public Security's 2020 national name report lists the fifty most-used surnames in order and puts Wu at number nine, behind Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, and Zhao. That is over twenty million people in the mainland alone; a 2013 national survey counted about 26.8 million, or two percent of the country, and ranked it eighth. Rankings that close move a place or two between survey years, which is the honest way to read them.

## Sources

- Records of the Grand Historian, ch. 31 (史记·吴太伯世家): Taibo and Zhongyong's flight to the southeast, the tattooing and hair-cutting, the founding of Gouwu, and King Fuchai's dying regret over Zixu: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E8%A8%98/%E5%8D%B7031

- Analects, Taibo chapter 8.1 (论语·泰伯), with James Legge's translation: Confucius on Taibo declining the kingdom three times: https://ctext.org/analects/tai-bo

- Shuowen Jiezi entry for 吳, with Duan Yucai's commentary: the surname and district senses, the "big speech" gloss, and the composition from 夨 and 口: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&char=%E5%90%B3

- Wiktionary, 吳: the bronze-inscription reading of the glyph as a figure shouting, plus the Cantonese, Hokkien, Vietnamese, and Korean readings: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%90%B3

- China National Radio on the Ministry of Public Security's 2020 national name report: the fifty most-used surnames in order, with Wu ninth: http://gx.cnr.cn/cnrgx/xinwendiaocha/20210208/t20210208_525410625.shtml

- Ng (name): the syllabic nasal, the surnames the spelling covers, and the respellings Ang, Eng, Ing, Ong, and Ung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name)

- Wu (surname 吳): romanizations by language, the 2013 survey figure, and Guangdong as the province with the most bearers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_(surname_%E5%90%B3)

- Wu Cheng'en: the anonymous 1592 publication of Journey to the West, Hu Shih's attribution, and Anthony C. Yu's verdict that the authorship remains unclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Cheng%27en

- Ngô Quyền (吳權): the Bạch Đằng river ambush of 938 and the end of a thousand years of Chinese rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C3%B4_Quy%E1%BB%81n

- Wu Sangui: the opening of the Shanhai Pass on 22 May 1644 and the Revolt of the Three Feudatories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Sangui

- Wu Daozi: the Tang painter called the Sage of Painting, the absence of any surviving original, and the legend of the vanishing mural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Daozi

- Goh Chok Tong: Singapore's second prime minister, November 1990 to August 2004, and his family's Minnan origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goh_Chok_Tong

- State of Wu: the Yangtze-delta kingdom founded by Taibo, its capital near modern Suzhou, and its absorption by Yue in 473 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_(state)

- Wu Chinese: around eighty-three million speakers in Shanghai, Zhejiang, and southern Jiangsu, named for the ancient Wu region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese