Lë

surname · Latin script

Lë is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Vietnam than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle French le, from Old French le, from Latin illum, by dropping il- and -m. Latin illum is the accusative singular of ille.

  • VNVietnam≈1 in 35few records(inferred from the name graph)
  • NONorway1 in 1.4K
  • AUAustralia≈1 in 1.5Kfew records

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Vietnam (inferred from the name graph)

≈2,900,000 people, est.

Record sources
521 (measured from records)

corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling

strongest: highest-authority source

≈1 in 35 (inferred from the name graph)

Vietnam, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

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Spellings & scripts

(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Le in US United States, DZ Algeria, AU Australia, Lê in VN Vietnam and Lé in ZA South Africa.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin

(measured from records)
Derivation of Lë: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Lë
  1. Middle Frenchle(measured from records)
  2. Old Frenchle(measured from records)
  3. Latinillum(measured from records)

From Middle French le, from Old French le, from Latin illum, by dropping il- and -m. Latin illum is the accusative singular of ille.

Cited for this meaning 7

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Muslim baby names (our 2,000 meaningful and beautiful names for boys and girls) English-Urdu with Roman
  • Wiktionary
  • Chinese Surnames Dictionary (Section 1)
  • YorùbáName Dictionary

Attested across 26 languages in the etymology graph.

Where the surname Lë is found

(measured from records)

Lë counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Lë is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
VN Vietnam—≈2,900,000 est.≈1 in 35127Lê8
US United States—110,9671 in 3K139KLe521
DZ Algeria#849≈20,000 est.≈1 in 2.4K—Le15
AU Australia—≈19,000 est.≈1 in 1.5K—Le264
ZA South Africa—≈6,600 est.≈1 in 9.7K—Lé112
NO Norway—3,9981 in 1.4K4K—67
FI Finland—1,9191 in 2.9K1.9K—33

Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Vietnamese Surname Corpus — academic citation compilation. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way

(inferred from the name graph)

Lë is also recorded as 8 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French surname26 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Canada, Réunion, Switzerland

    Also written Le, Lê, Lé, Lę, 'Le

  • a separate surname55 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Ukraine, United States, Mexico

    Also written Le, Lê, Lē, Lę, Lè

  • Vietnamese surname17 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Vietnam, United States, Singapore, France

    Also written Lê, Lễ, Lẻ, Lẹ, Lẽ

  • Spanish surname37 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Mexico, Spain, France, Brazil

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Le, Lê, Lé, Le', L'E

  • Swedish surname39 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Sweden, Denmark, Cameroon, Algeria

    Languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

    Also written L-E, Lê, Lę, Le, Lè

  • Indonesian given name15 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia

    Also written Le, Lệ, Lẻ, Lé, Ĺë

  • Chinese surname9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Taiwan, China, United States, Hong Kong

    Also written Lê, Le, Lè, Lệ, Lé

  • a separate name10 spellings in the group

    Also written Lê, Lé, Lệ, Le, Ļê

13 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

(measured from records)

Lë is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Albanian, to leave, to leave behind

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In syd-pro, bone

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Evidence

(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Lë under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Lë mean, and where does it come from?
From Middle French le, from Old French le, from Latin illum, by dropping il- and -m. Latin illum is the accusative singular of ille. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and Muslim baby names (our 2,000 meaningful and beautiful names for boys and girls) English-Urdu with Roman and 5 other sources.
Which countries have the most people with the surname Lë?
Mondonomo estimates about 2.9 million people named Lë in Vietnam, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lê. After it come United States, Algeria, Australia and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
How common is the name Lë?
In the United States, the national register counted 110,967 people named Lë in 2010, about 1 in 3.0 thousand residents.
How common is Lë compared with other names?
In Algeria, Lë is the 849th most common surname of 89,473 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Lë?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/l%C3%AB

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Lë” — ranked 3rd in Vietnam (Vietnamese Surname Corpus). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Lë parses inside a full name →