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]
This page lists people with the surnameWāng. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.