The Yoruba people (/ˈjɒrʊbə/ YORR-ub-ə; Yoruba: Ìran Yorùbá, Ọmọ Odùduwà, Ọmọ Káàárọ̀-oòjíire) are a West African ethnic group who inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, which are collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute more than 50 million people in Africa, are over a million outside the continent, and bear further representation among the African diaspora. The vast majority of Yoruba are within Nigeria, where they make up 20.7% of the country's population according to Ethnologue estimations, making them one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. Most Yoruba people speak the Yoruba language, which is the Niger-Congo language with the largest number of native or L1 speakers.

In Africa, the Yoruba are contiguous with the Yoruboid Itsekiri to the south-east in the northwest Niger Delta, Bariba to the northwest in Benin and Nigeria, the Nupe to the north, and the Ebira to the northeast in Central Nigeria. To the east are the Edo, Ẹsan, and Afemai groups in Mid-Western Nigeria. To the northeast and adjacent to the Ebira and Northern Edo, groups are the related Igala people on the left bank of the Niger River. To the south are the Gbe-speaking Mahi, Gun, Fon, and Ewe who border Yoruba communities in Benin and Togo, to the west they are bordered by the Kwa-speaking Akebu, Kposo of Togo, and to the northwest, by the Kwa-speaking Anii, and the Gur speaking Kabiye, Yom-Lokpa and Tem people of Togo. Significantly Yoruba populations in other West African countries can also be found in Ghana, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.

Outside Africa, the Yoruba diaspora consists of two main groupings; the first being that of the Yorubas taken as slaves to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, notably to the Caribbean (especially in Cuba) and Brazil, and the second consisting of a wave of relatively recent migrants, the majority of whom began to migrate to the United Kingdom and the United States following some of the major economic and political changes encountered in Africa in the 1960s till date.

The oldest known textual reference to the name Yoruba is found in an essay (titled – Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd) from a manuscript written by the Berber jurist Ahmed Baba in the year 1614. The original manuscript is preserved in the Ahmed Baba Institute of the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu, while a digital copy is at the World Digital Library. Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd provides one of the earliest known ideas about the ethnic composition of the West African interior. The relevant section of the essay which lists the Yoruba group alongside nine others in the region as translated by John Hunwick and Fatima Harrak for the Institute of African Studies Rabat, reads:

"We will add another rule for you, that is that whoever now comes to you from among the group called Mossi, or Gurma, or Bussa, or Borgu, or Dagomba, or Kotokoli, or Yoruba, or Tombo, or Bobo, or K.rmu – all of these are unbelievers remaining in their unbelief until now. Similarly Kumbe except for a few people of Hombori"

This early 1600s reference implies that the name Yoruba was already in popular demotic use as far back as at least the 1500s. Regarding the source and derivation of this name, guesses were posited by various foreign sociologists of external sources. These include; Ya'rub (son of Canaanite, Joktan) by Caliph Muhammed Bello of Sokoto, Goru Ba by T.J Bowen, or Yolla Ba (Mande word for the Niger river) etc. These guesses suffer a lack of support by many locals for being alien to (and unfounded in) the traditions of the Yorubas themselves. In his work, Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains c.1863, the English ethnologist Richard F. Burton reports of a Yoruba account in 1861, noting that the name "Yoruba" derives from Ori Obba, i.e. -The Head King. It was applied ex-situ originally in reference to the Yoruba sociolinguistic group as a whole. Centuries later however, it evolved to be applied exclusively to the Ọ̀yọ́ subgroup when this subgroup rose to attain imperial status, particularly at its apogee (c.1650 – c.1750) until in the mid-1800s when this trend was reversed back to the original context.

The name Yoruba is the most well known ethnonym for the group of people that trace a common origin to Ife, but synonymous terms have been recorded in history such as; Nago/Anago, Lucumi/Olukumi and Aku/Oku.

Some Exonyms the Yoruba are known by across West Africa include; Alata in southern Ghana, Eyagi in Nupe which produced descendant terms such as; Ayagi (the pre-modern Hausa word for the Yoruba people) and Iyaji in Igala.