Hok-Yau
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Meaning
scholarly friend (學友); famously borne by Jacky Cheung Hok-yau, Cantopop's God of Songs
The story
Hok-Yau reads in this collection as scholarly friend, 學友, and one bearer made the pairing famous. Jacky Cheung Hok-yau, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop, is often dubbed the God of Songs; he is the best-selling music artist of all time in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with over 60 million albums sold worldwide. In 1995 his album sales exceeded five million copies, making him the second highest-selling artist in the world that year, behind Michael Jackson. Hong Kong custom keeps two names running side by side, and his English name has its own page; Hok-yau is the Chinese half, two characters carried in the record beside the English one. In American records the romanized pair is absent. In Cantopop, the surname plus these two characters is simply what the word singer means.
How popular is Hok-Yau around the world?
Hok-Yau does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
United States
under 5 a year
Hok-Yau does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
Births with a Social Security record. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration
Not on the record in Spain, Mexico City, Argentina, Puerto Rico, England and Wales, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Poland: those registries withhold small counts, so rare uses may sit below their floors.
Not on the Chile record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 5 registrations in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the Montevideo record for 1940 to 2011: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the France record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 20 births in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the South Australia record for 1944 to 2017: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the Austria record for 1984 to 2025: Statistik Austria publishes every first name down to a single birth, so this name was not given there in those years (before 2010 the record covers babies with Austrian citizenship only). Not on Norway’s list: Statistics Norway lists only first names carried by 200 or more living people, so rarer names are not shown.
Keep exploring
The Hok-Yau deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Hok-Yau truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Hok-Yau fits with your family’s names and surname.
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