Hui is a surname. It is the Hanyu Pinyin spelling of two Chinese surnames, as well as a variant spelling of two others.
Origins
Surname Huì (惠)
The Chinese character used to write this surname means "favour" or "benefit". It is the 204th surname in the traditional poem Hundred Family Surnames. The Mingxian Shizu Yanxing Leigao section of the Siku Quanshu encyclopedia states that this surname was adopted from the posthumous name of King Hui of Zhou. The descendants who adopted the surname settled in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. During the Qing Dynasty, some Manchu people also adopted this surname. In Sino-Korean pronunciation, this character is read Hye. It is not used as a surname in modern Korea, but can be found as an element of Korean given names. In Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation, it is read Huệ.
Surname Huí (回)
The Chinese character used to write this surname means "return". It does not appear in Hundred Family Surnames. Sources published during the Song dynasty, including the Guangyun dictionary, Xingjie, the section "Given Names Used as Surnames" in the Tongzhi encyclopedia, and , state three origins for this surname:
It was originally the personal name of Wu Hui, a son of the legendary Zhurong. Wu Hui's son Sun later took Hui as his surname.
It is found as a surname among the Hui people. However, the sources do not explain its origin.
In Sino-Korean pronunciation, this character is read Hoe. It is not used as a surname in modern Korea, and only rarely as an element of given names. In Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation, it is read Hồi.
Other
Hui may be the spelling of two other Chinese surnames, based on their pronunciation in different varieties of Chinese; they are listed below by their spelling in Hanyu Pinyin, which reflects the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation:
Xǔ, spelled Hui based on its Cantonese pronunciation
Fèi, spelled Hui based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects, e.g. Teochew
Statistics
According to reports in 2014, the surname Huì meaning "favour" was the 262nd-most-common surname in mainland China. It had roughly 298,000 bearers, primarily in Shaanxi, Henan, Shandong, and Jiangsu. According to statistics cited by Patrick Hanks, there were 581 people on the island of Great Britain and 34 on the island of Ireland with the surname Hui as of 2011. There were no people with the surname on the island of Great Britain in 1881. The 2010 United States Census found 5,768 people with the surname Hui, making it the 5,966th-most-common name in the country. This represented an increase from 5,282 in the 2000 Census. In both censuses, more than nine-tenths of the bearers of the surname identified as Asian. It was the 228th-most-common surname among respondents to the 2000 Census who identified as Asian.
