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Mo

Mo, also written Mao. Attested in United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 6,236 people in the registers this map holds.

Also written

A person linked these — Wikidata's «said to be the same as», or a family archive that worked it out from documents.

Mao

Only sounds alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence.

M.MiMuMyMǎMeoMeø

What Wikidata says this name is

Copied from Wikidata, not worked out here. It is crowd-sourced and wrong in places, which is why the item is linked below rather than the claim simply repeated.

  • Chinese · Korean · Italian the language of the name

    Which is not where a family is from. A Polish surname can be borne by people whose forebears never saw Poland, and often is.

  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q113461198 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

What Wiktionary says this name is

Copied from the surname template on Wiktionary, not worked out here, and not from its etymology prose. Anyone may edit it; the page and the revision it was read at are linked below.

  • Chinese what the English entry says it is from
  • English · Italian recorded as a surname in these languages

    A language here is the language of the NAME, not a country a family came from — the same caveat the Wikidata section carries, and worth repeating rather than assumed read.

Mo on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 92387284. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

3 places drawn, the largest being Mao, Mao, MaóMaó — 29,125Mao — 48,297Mao — 50,681
Where those places are. A dot is a settlement whose name is this surname, sized by its population — not a claim that anybody of the name lives there. Phonetic neighbours are listed below but not drawn: putting a machine's guess on the ground would dress it up as geography.

This is as close to an origin as this map will go. A surname that is also a place name often came from it — and often did not: plenty are occupations or patronymics that happen to collide with a place, and plenty of places are named after a family rather than the other way round. It is a fact with a source, which is more than an etymology page offers.

  • Mao Chad pop. 50,681 a spelling of the name
  • Mao Dominican Rep. pop. 48,297 a spelling of the name
  • Maó Spain pop. 29,125 a spelling of the name
  • Meo Italy pop. 7 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 7 countries: United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 7 peopleItaly — 27 peopleFrance — 198 peopleSpain — 408 peopleNorway — 1,613 peopleUnited States of America — 3,983 people
A dot is a country, not a place. It sits at the country's centre because a national register counts a country; nothing here says where in it these people are. A hollow ring is attested but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each, and a family archive finds a name without counting heads. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 7 countries where the eleven registers and eight archives behind this atlas attest the name. Most of the world has no surname register this project can read, and the ones that do and will not are listed with the reason.
Belgium, by commune. 7 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Aalst with 7. This is the only country here that can be drawn this way — every other register counts a country and stops, so a blank elsewhere is a gap in what states publish, not in the name.
1 place drawn, the largest being AalstAalst — 7

Country by country

Each country below can carry up to three different kinds of evidence, and none of them is the same claim. A register is a head-count — a state counted these people. A record is one document naming the surname on that ground, narrower evidence and often much older. And a volume overlapping these dates is a document from the right place and years — never a document known to name this surname. None of the three ever means the name exists in that country and nowhere else, or that it exists nowhere but here.

United States of America

3,983 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

135,569 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Mo is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mo. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Norway

1,613 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Spain

408 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

17 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1980s — the decades Mo is attested here. None is known to name Mo: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

France

198 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

5 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1910s and 1950s — the decades Mo is attested here. None is known to name Mo: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Italy

27 Borne — a state counted them — Italian comuni publishing their residents' surnames as open data, indexed by the national catalogue dati.gov.it..

Whose archive to write to

43,185 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1930s and 2010s — the decades Mo is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mo. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Belgium

7 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Mo in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to
Attested here, and nothing that survives covers those years

Mo is attested in Denmark in the 1970s. Not one of the 4,099 volumes this atlas holds for Denmark covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Denmark's shelf rather than after.

When it was being born, in France

INSEE counts births by surname and decade from the état civil, 1891 to 2000 — the only dated evidence in this dataset. A name that starts at zero and climbs arrived; a name that falls to nothing left, died out, or emigrated, and the decade it stops is the decade to stop searching. It counts births registered in France, so a family that emigrated in 1900 simply stops appearing, which is information rather than a defect.

  • 1891–1900 14
  • 1901–1910 8
  • 1911–1920 4
  • 1921–1930 27
  • 1931–1940 12
  • 1941–1950 21
  • 1951–1960 29
  • 1961–1970 12
  • 1971–1980 24
  • 1981–1990 25
  • 1991–2000 22

Whose archive held that ground, and when

Every surname site can tell you a name is common somewhere. This one also knows which filing system held that ground in which years — and those are the two halves of one question: my people were called this, they were there, so who has the paper, and for which century. A name in Croatia before 1881 may sit in a military series and not a county one; a name in the Netherlands before 1811 has no civil record at all, only a baptism.

This is about the ground, not about your family. A register counting a name in a country says nothing about which village. And these are the pieces of a country this atlas has drawn, which in a large one may be a corner of it — Acadia reaches into Maine and is not a statement about the United States, and Bohemia's ground crosses into Poland. Each region's own page says which ground it covers. Where a country is missing below, nothing covers it yet.

United States of America
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway
France
Italy
  • Carnia, Friuli 6 eras Patriarchate of Aquileia → Republic of Venice → Austria → Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Campania — Caserta and Naples 5 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Eastern Sicily — Catania 4 eras Kingdom of Sicily → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → Italy
  • Calabria 4 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Italy
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …
Belgium

Regions are also drawn in 1 other country where this name is attested, further down the register's own list. The order here is how many people a register counted, so the countries above are the ones the name most belongs to.

No record region is drawn yet for Spain — which is a gap in this atlas and not a statement about that country.

Find Mo on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable