Yao
An Ewe name meaning "born on Thursday". In Poland barely 37 people carry it, split almost evenly between women and men. It's one of the rare names most Poles will never meet.
Yao Pronunciation
Yao is pronounced ih-AH-o (/ɨˈaɔ/).
What Yao means
Where Yao comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Yao lives in two worlds. Among the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo and Benin, it names a boy born on Thursday. Their tradition gives each child a name for the weekday of birth, and Yao states that plain fact. Born on Thursday. In Polish, urodzony w czwartek.
The Chinese Yao is a separate story. Written 姚, it ranks among the oldest surnames in China, and old records tie it to the legendary Emperor Shun. The basketball player Yao Ming carried the name into arenas far from Shanghai, where it became familiar to people who had never met an Ewe child.
The name has no Polish diminutive and no imieniny. On a class register in Poland it would stand out at once, three letters with no cousin forms beside them. Its origin sits outside the European stock, filed simply as other. What stays fixed across both worlds is the smaller, older sense: born on Thursday.
How many people are named Yao
1 in 1016485 men in Poland is named Yao. 37 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #6530 among male names.
Yao as a middle name
Yao is a first name for 37 men in Poland and a middle name for another 6, an 86/14 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 4515th, between Yacob (6) and Yaqub (6).
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#4513 Wołodymyr6
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#4514 Yacob6
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#4515 Yao6
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#4516 Yaqub6
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#4517 Yared6