Tou (surname)

Tou may be:

• An English surname, recorded in the Domesday Book as the name of a landholder^[1]
• The Cantonese Jyutping romanisation of the Chinese surname spelled in Mandarin Pinyin as Táo (陶)
• The Wade–Giles romanisation of various Chinese surnames spelled in Pinyin as Dou (斗, 竇; IPA: /toʊ̯/)^[2]
• An alternative spelling of the Chinese surname spelled in Pinyin as Tuǒ (庹)
• A Cambodian surname (ទូ; IPA: /tuː/), spelled in both Geographic Department romanisation and UNGEGN romanisation as Tu

As of 2017, 2 people in Denmark and 48 people in Norway bore the surname Tou.^[3][4]

The 2010 United States census found 312 people with the surname Tou, making it the 63,873rd-most-common name in the country, up from 251 (72,237th-most-common) in the 2000 census. In both censuses, slightly more than three-quarters of the bearers of the surname identified as Asian, and between 10% and 15% as White.^[5]

People with the surname Tou include:

• Tou Samouth (ទូ សាមុត; c. 1915–1962), Cambodian communist politician
• Holger Tou (1919–1947), Norwegian police official and collaborator with Nazi Germany
• Tou Chung-hua (Chinese: 庹宗華; pinyin: Tuǒ Zōnghuá; born 1962), Taiwanese actor
• Drissa Tou (born 1973), Burkinabe boxer