Afonso

given name · Portuguese · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Afonso is a given name, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country. In Cape Verde it is the 5th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Portuguese and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: a male given name, feminine equivalent Afonsa, equivalent to English Alfonso or Alphonse.

rarermore common
  • CVCape Verde1 in 98
  • PTPortugal1 in 355
  • AOAngola1 in 1.1K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈42K

across 9 countries

Sources
182

106K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 5.1K

Brazil

Meaning & origin

a male given name, feminine equivalent Afonsa, equivalent to English Alfonso or Alphonse

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Afonso is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
BR Brazil#52741,26878K rec.1 in 5.1K49KAfonso172
PT Portugal#6523,62611K rec.978Afonso140
AO Angola#192,1142.8K rec.5Afonso46
CV Cape Verde#51,2949 rec.3Afonso20
ZA South Africa304470 rec.Afonso33
US United States2766.3K rec.1 in 1.2M1.5KAfonso182
GB United Kingdom272748 rec.listedAfonso95
MZ Mozambique#35173153 rec.2Afonso33
CH Switzerland135223 rec.849Afonso41
ES Spain1334.5K rec.1 in 376K10KAfonso111
SE Sweden5823 rec.1 in 176K5812
DK Denmark280 rec.1 in 210K281

Roughly 41K people in Brazil bear this name (about 1 in 5.1K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages

  • Portuguese841K94%
  • English45K5%
  • French4.2K1%
  • Spanish2K1%
  • ptbr7691%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Portuguese841,06594%
English45,3295%
French4,1581%
Spanish1,9581%
ptbr7691%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way

Afonso is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name62K records spelled Afonso8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Portugal, United States, Germany

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Afönsö, Äfönsö

  • French given name47K records spelled Afonso5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Spain, Belgium, Angola

    Languages: French, Catalan

    Also written Ąfonso, Ãfonsõ, Àfonso

  • Russian surname614 records spelled Afonso10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Ukraine, Türkiye, United States

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

    Also written Афонсо, Афонсу, Afonsu

58 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

Afonso is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • noble and attentive

    as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…

  • In English, king of Portugal

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time

020K40K60K19401960198020002020

Show as table
Afonso in IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror), Brazil, 1930–2022
Yearrecords
19306
19401,478
19505,682
196013,367
197021,316
198025,978
199029,506
200034,936
201037,587
202039,716
202241,268

BR IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)11 years between 1930–2022. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name

100012001400160018002000Afonso I of Portugal, b. 1109Afonso II of Portugal, b. 1185Afonso III, b. 1210Afonso IV of Portugal, b. 1291Afonso V of Portugal, b. 1432Afonso de Albuquerque, b. 1452Afonso, Prince of Portugal, b. 1475Afonso VI of Portugal, b. 1643Afonso Augusto Moreira Pena, b. 1847Infante Afonso, Duke of Oporto, b. 1865

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence

Attested in 60 sources across 28 countries.

Official registers attesting Afonso
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)49K#797
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)202241K
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)41K#651
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)10K#541
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)10K#541
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls1.6K#100
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)20201.6K
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.5K#18,712
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls1.4K#4,206
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020101.2K#21,260
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020001.1K#22,481
PT PortugalIRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023)2024978#7

Reference works 6

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 149 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Afonso?
We estimate roughly 42 thousand people bear Afonso (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Afonso have the most bearers?
We estimate about 41 thousand people bear Afonso in Brazil, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled afonso.
How common is Afonso compared with other names?
In Brazil, Afonso is the 527th most common given name of 536,280 given names recorded there.
Is Afonso a male or female name?
Afonso is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Afonso mean?
Recorded meaning: a male given name, feminine equivalent Afonsa, equivalent to English Alfonso or Alphonse
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/afonso

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Afonso” — the 527th most common given name in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Afonso parses inside a full name →