Leone

surname · English · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Leone is a surname, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. It appears chiefly in English and Spanish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: from a personal name based on a nickname for a fierce or brave warrior, from leone ‘lion’ (Latin leo, genitive leonis).

rarermore common
  • ITItaly1 in 6.3K◐
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 11K
  • USUnited States1 in 22K

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

≈21K ●

across 10 countries

Sources
382 ●

194K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 11K ◐

Switzerland

Spellings & scripts●

Locally spelled Leoné in ZA South Africa.

Meaning & origin●

from a personal name based on a nickname for a fierce or brave warrior, from leone ‘lion’ (Latin leo, genitive leonis).

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Leone is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—15,364155K rec.1 in 22K15KLeone382
GB United Kingdom—7,2628.7K rec.——Leone90
IT Italy#2756,6076.7K rec.—285Leone119
AR Argentina—3,682△1 rec.1 in 12K3.7K—3
AU Australia—3,1206.2K rec.——Leone103
CA Canada—3,1143.8K rec.—1Leone77
DE Germany—2,2452.5K rec.——Leone85
CH Switzerland—771△196 rec.1 in 11K771Leone26
NL Netherlands—655718 rec.—85Leone22
RU Russia—459562 rec.——Leone10
NZ New Zealand—452598 rec.—18Leone34
BE Belgium—377232 rec.1 in 31K433Leone28

Roughly 15K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 22K). 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●

  • English149K56%
  • Spanish40K15%
  • Italian17K7%
  • French15K6%
  • Portuguese14K5%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English148,58456%
Spanish40,17715%
Italian17,4477%
French15,4226%
Portuguese13,8585%

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◐

Leone is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish surname151K records spelled Leone10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Argentina, Brazil, United States, Italy

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Leoné, Léone, Lëönë, Leône, Leonè

  • a separate surname5.9K records spelled Leone7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Italy, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Leōne, Léone, Leoné, Leóne, Leonė

  • Arabic surname1.6K records spelled Leone8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Italy, United States, Egypt, Palestine

    Also written Lēõnę, Leóne, Léone, Leonè, Lëónê

  • Polish surname1.2K records spelled Leone7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, United States, Czechia, Italy

    Languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak

    Also written Lèone, Léoné, Léone, Leoné

  • Estonian surname1.0K records spelled Leone4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Italy, United States, Finland, Canada

    Languages: Estonian, Finnish

    Also written Léone, Lëönë

65 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●

Leone is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • From Late Latin. See }Leo in main dictionary.

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In Italian, lion

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Italian, Dal lat. leo ‘leone’; nome usato anche dagli Israeliti. S. Leone I papa, 11 aprile.

    as a nameDizionario Dei Nomi e Cognomi Italiani

  • In Italian, Dei tredici papi di questo nome, dei quali cinque canonizzati, il più venerato è S. Leorie Jlagno, che salvò Roma da Attila. 11 aprile. Nome ueato anche dagli Iliraeliti. Derivato Leonzio. Diminutivo Leonello, Lionello (negli Estensi). Cogn. di derivazione evidente Leoni, -netti, Leou- cini, ecc.

    as a nameNomi e Cognomi: Saggio di ricerche etimologiche e storiche

  • In French, Le leone est l’unité monétaire de la Sierra Leone, État de l’Afrique occidentale.

    as a name2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)

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●

0100200300190019502000253 · 1916

Show as table
Leone in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1880–2025
Yearrecords
18807
188110
188211
18835
188412
188512
188612
188717
188817
188922
189026
189122
189237
189344
189436
189547
189643
189751
189869
189942
190067
190183
190279
190366
190497
1905102
190694
190781
1908107
190998
191098
1911111
1912139
1913167
1914171
1915225
1916253
1917217
1918252
1919204
1920199
1921195
1922171
1923169
1924151
1925148
1926119
1927117
1928101
192983
193085
193189
193276
193370
193478
193585
193646
193749
193854
193944
194038
194138
194237
194336
194440
194535
194640
194722
194834
194930
195022
195122
195228
195331
195416
195521
195621
195714
195816
19599
196011
196114
19627
196314
196414
19656
19666
19678
196815
19696
19707
19725
19735
19776
19795
19807
19865
19916
19935
19966
19977
19997
20017
20025
20047
20058
20067
20088
200910
201010
20119
201211
201313
201419
201524
201612
201712
201823
201921
202017
202122
202223
202325
202423
202525

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 125 years between 1880–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1850190019502000Pietro Leone, b. 1888Giovanni Leone, b. 1908Ignazio Leone, b. 1923Sergio Leone, b. 1929Giuseppina Leone, b. 1934Reina Leone, b. 1974Sunny Leone, b. 1981Damien Leone, b. 1984Miriam Leone, b. 1985Chiara Leone, b. 1998

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 85 sources across 43 countries.

Official registers attesting Leone
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201015K#2,372
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200015K#2,216
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202015K#2,428
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)20225.8K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—5.4K#3,196
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—5K#2,471
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—3.7K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20201.3K#8,098
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)2024771#1,593
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—736#2,471
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020467#8,098
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)—433#3,634

Reference works 8

  • 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
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary

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

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 469 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Leone?
We estimate roughly 21 thousand people bear Leone (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
In which country does Leone have the most bearers?
We estimate about 15 thousand people bear Leone in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled leone.
How common is Leone compared with other names?
In Italy, Leone is the 275th most common surname of 512,490 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Leone mean?
Recorded meaning: from a personal name based on a nickname for a fierce or brave warrior, from leone ‘lion’ (Latin leo, genitive leonis).
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/leone

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, “Leone” — the 275th most common surname in Italy. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Leone parses inside a full name →