Tak-Wah
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Meaning
virtuous splendor (德華); the Cantonese given name of Andy Lau Tak-wah of the Four Heavenly Kings, whose Andy already sits in this collection. The two entries are one man, which is exactly how the Hong Kong dual-name convention works
The story
Andy Lau's name is a piece of deliberate craft: the record shows he was born Lau Fook-wing, and Tak-wah, virtue and splendor, is the name he carries in his professional life. Few names have been worked harder. In the 1990s he was named one of Cantopop's Four Heavenly Kings, and by 2006 he had entered Guinness World Records for most awards won by a Cantopop male artist, 444 of them. In 2005 Hong Kong handed him a number one box office actor award for the years 1985 to 2005, built on 108 films in twenty years. In American birth records Tak-Wah sits at the floor, the usual story for romanized Cantonese given names. What the name shows instead is worth knowing: a name is not always the one a person started with, and it can still be earned in public for decades.
How popular is Tak-Wah around the world?
Tak-Wah 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
Tak-Wah 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 Tak-Wah deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Tak-Wah 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 Tak-Wah fits with your family’s names and surname.
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