Luu
A surname found especially among Vietnamese families, with the exact root often depending on the family’s original language and spelling history.
The #2,324 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 19,663 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The provided historical excerpts do not actually explain Luu as a surname; they only contain incidental mentions, so the old sources here are not enough to support a specific derivation. In modern use, Luu is best treated as a Vietnamese family name, often written in the Romanized Quoc Ngu spelling system. In some cases it may represent different underlying Vietnamese characters or spellings, so a single fixed literal meaning cannot be stated safely from these excerpts alone.
History
As a Vietnamese surname, Luu is borne by families in Vietnam and in the global Vietnamese diaspora. English-language census records in the United States show it as a relatively uncommon but established surname. Because the OCR excerpts do not provide a true historical entry for this name, older European surname dictionaries are not useful evidence for its origin here.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
In Romanized Vietnamese, the same surname can appear with or without diacritics depending on the context, so Luu may correspond to a diacritic-marked original form in Vietnamese records.
From the historical record
“Ill: ibid. 1540. BapL— Luu Bdwinne: St. Pelcr. Cornhai I 2. i.uf. Buied— Leonard Edwyn : ibid. 157S. — John. a. John Bdwyn, plane :”
— A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, with special American instances