Shū

given name · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Shū is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Borrowed from Egyptian šw (“Shu”, literally “Emptiness”), a derivative of the verb šwj (“to be empty, devoid of”).

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

3 other spellings are counted as the same name:

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)

Borrowed from Egyptian šw (“Shu”, literally “Emptiness”), a derivative of the verb šwj (“to be empty, devoid of”).

Sources 3

  • A concise dictionary of first names
  • Wiktionary
  • Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007)

Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

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

Where Shū is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spelling
US United States—3.2K—
ES Spain—250—
BR Brazil—97—
SE Sweden—90—
FI Finland—59—

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 2020; INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)

Shū is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name46 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Malaysia, United Kingdom, Taiwan

    Languages: English, Chinese, Malay

    Also written Shu, Shue, Shuee, Shüe, Shù

  • French given name6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, China, Cameroon

    Also written Shu, Shù, Shü, Shû

  • Hindi given name42 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Bangladesh

    Languages: Hindi, Bangla, Urdu

    Also written Sue, Su, Shu, সু, Suh

  • Russian given name22 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in China, Russia, United States, Ukraine

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

    Also written Shu, Shou, Shue, Schu, Шу

2 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)

Shū is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin reading of 書 /书

    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.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

19201940196019802000Shu Uemura, b. 1928Shū Wada, b. 1938Shu Kamo, b. 1939Son Sook, b. 1944Shu Watanabe, b. 1961Shu Takumi, b. 1971Shū Kurata, b. 1988Shu Watanabe, b. 1991Shu Maeda, b. 1993Shu Mogi, b. 1999

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 1 sources across 0 countries.

Reference works 1

  • Wikipedia given-name tokens

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Shū mean, and where does it come from?
Borrowed from Egyptian šw (“Shu”, literally “Emptiness”), a derivative of the verb šwj (“to be empty, devoid of”). Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and Wiktionary and 1 other source.
Is Shū a male or female name?
Shū is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
In which country does Shū have the most bearers?
Shū is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Shū?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sh%C5%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, “Shū”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Shū parses inside a full name →