Su is the pinyin romanization of the common Chinese surname written in simplified characters and traditionally. It was listed 42nd among the Song-era list of the Hundred Family Surnames. In 2019 it was the 46th most common surname in mainland China. Romanizations The Wade form of the name is identical to the pinyin, but it is also sometimes irregularly romanized as Soo. and are also romanized So and Sou in Cantonese; Soh and Souw in Southern Min dialects; Soh in Teochew; and Thu in Gan. This Chinese name is also the source of the Vietnamese surname Tô (Chữ Nôm: ); the Korean surname , which is romanized So; the Japanese surname , which is also romanized So; and the Filipino/Tagalog surname So. Also, the Filipino family name "Solon" is a Hispanicized version of So. The Solon clan coming from Cebu are famous for their ancestors who were government officials. The Solons were originally from Canton. Distribution Su was the 41st-most-common Chinese surname in the mainland during the 1982 census and the 45th-most-common in the 2007 report on household registrations released by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. It has been listed as the 23rd-most-common Chinese surname in Taiwan. Su is a somewhat common surname in the United States, listed 5,897th during the 1990 census and 3,835th during the year 2000 one. The other romanizations are less popular: So (8527 & 5167), Soo (17545 & 22160), Sou (77891 & 30226), Thu (49039 & 64912), and Soh (unlisted & 40074); Souw had fewer than one hundred resident bearers in the United States during both censuses and was unlisted both times. Statistics Canada does not release surname lists from its censuses, but Su and So were both listed among the 200-most-common peculiarly Chinese-Canadian surnames in a 2010 survey of the Registered Persons Database of all current and former Canadian health card recipients in the province of Ontario. Character decomposition The character was formed by the addition of the grass radical () to the character (s , sū, "revive"), itself a combination of the characters for "fish" (t , s , yú) and "grain" (, hé). Origins The original pronunciation of 穌 has been reconstructed as *s.ŋˤa in Old Chinese, but this had already developed into su by the time of Middle Chinese. The addition of the grass radical suggests its original meaning was its use describing varieties of the mint perilla, but its