Le is a romanization of several rare East Asian surnames and a common Vietnamese surname.

It is a fairly common surname in the United States, ranked 975th during the 1990 census and 368th during the 2000 census.[1] In 2000, it was the eighth-most-common surname among America's Asian and Pacific Islander population,[2] predominantly from its Vietnamese use.[3] It was also reported among the top 200 surnames in Ontario, Canada, based on a survey of that province's Registered Persons Database of Canadian health card recipients as of the year 2000.[4]

Origins of surname

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Vietnamese

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is a common Vietnamese surname (third most common), written in Chữ Hán. It is pronounced /le˧˧/ in the Hanoi dialect and /lej˧˧/ in the Saigon dialect. It is usually pronounced /liː/ in English, with it being commonly mistaken for another surname, with similar spelling and pronunciation in English, .

Chinese

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Mandarin

Le is the Pinyin romanization of the Chinese surname (written in Simplified Chinese characters and 樂 in Traditional Chinese characters); it is Lok in Cantonese.

Minnan

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or Le is the POJ romanization of the Chinese surname Li (, )

People with the surname

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Vietnamese

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Chinese

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Other

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  • Nhi Le (born 1995) German journalist, speaker, discussion moderator and author.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ US Census Bureau. Op. cit. Public Broadcasting Service. "How Popular Is Your Last Name? Archived 2015-11-27 at the Wayback Machine" Accessed 6 Apr 2012.
  2. ^ "Genealogy Data: Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000". 27 Sep 2011. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  3. ^ Lauderdale, Diane S.; et al. (2000). "Asian American ethnic identification by surname" (PDF). Population Research and Policy Review. 19 (3): 283–300. doi:10.1023/A:1026582308352. S2CID 151050659. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-01-02.
  4. ^ Shah, B. R.; Chiu, M.; Amin, S.; Ramani, M.; Sadry, S.; Tu, J. V. (2010). "Surname lists to identify South Asian and Chinese ethnicity from secondary data in Ontario, Canada: A validation study". BMC Medical Research Methodology. 10: 42. doi:10.1186/1471-2288-10-42. PMC 2877682. PMID 20470433.