Mendes
surname · Portuguese · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Mendes is a surname, most frequently recorded in Mexico, where it is the 33rd most common surname. It appears chiefly in Portuguese and French, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: patronymic from the personal name Mendo, a reduced form of Menendo (see Menendez).
- GWGuinea-Bissau1 in 20◐
- CRCosta Rica1 in 114
- PTPortugal1 in 147
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈430K ●
- #138 ●
- 5 ●
- Sources
- 422 ●
- 1 in 114 ◐
across 10 countries
of 21M surnames
recorded for this name
4.6M records
Official registry-verified
Costa Rica
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Mendez in MX Mexico, US United States, AR Argentina and 18 more and Méndez in GT Guatemala, UY Uruguay, FR France.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin●
patronymic from the personal name Mendo, a reduced form of Menendo (see Menendez).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MX Mexico | #33 | 1,569,230 | 1.4M rec. | — | 11K | Mendez | 246 |
| VE Venezuela | #38 | 358,439 | 344K rec. | — | 775 | Mendez | 109 |
| SV El Salvador | #37 | 237,693 | 133K rec. | — | 38K | Mendez | 74 |
| US United States | #200 | 161,717 | 1M rec. | 1 in 2.1K | 166K | Mendez | 422 |
| PE Peru | #208 | 149,144 | 147K rec. | — | — | Mendez | 90 |
| CO Colombia | #81 | 111,976 | 47K rec. | — | 56 | Mendez | 163 |
| AR Argentina | #71 | 90,174 | 380K rec. | 1 in 504 | 90K | Mendez | 135 |
| CL Chile | #127 | 87,894 | 13K rec. | — | 1 | Mendez | 123 |
| GW Guinea-Bissau | #4 | 85,245 | 346 rec. | — | 85K | Mendes | 28 |
| ES Spain | #56 | 77,195 | 135K rec. | 1 in 648 | 77K | Mendez | 202 |
| PT Portugal | #23 | 57,844 | 17K rec. | — | — | Mendes | 184 |
| PH Philippines | #229 | 48,978 | 83K rec. | — | — | Mendez | 92 |
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- Portuguese3.9M93%
- French94K2%
- English60K1%
- Spanish58K1%
- ptbr13K1%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Portuguese | 3,904,980 | 93% |
| French | 94,089 | 2% |
| English | 60,034 | 1% |
| Spanish | 57,641 | 1% |
| ptbr | 12,612 | 1% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Mendes is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Sergio, Brazilian entertainer
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Latin, of or belonging to Mendes, a town of Lower Egypt on the delta of the Nile (in modern times called Tell El-Ruba)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Galician, second-person singular present subjunctive of mendar
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Spanish, a surname, variant of Méndez
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 1891 | 7 |
| 1901 | 17 |
| 1911 | 17 |
| 1921 | 60 |
| 1931 | 112 |
| 1941 | 89 |
| 1951 | 97 |
| 1961 | 725 |
| 1971 | 2,032 |
| 1981 | 1,405 |
| 1991 | 1,675 |
FR INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) — 11 years between 1891–1991. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Francisco Mendesb. 1939GWPrime Minister of Guinea-Bissau (1939-1978)
- Sérgio Mendesb. 1941BRBrazilian musician (1941–2024)
- Chico Mendesb. 1944BRBrazilian trade union leader and environmentalist (1944–1988)
- Sam Mendesb. 1965GBBritish stage and film director (born 1965)
- Tiago Mendesb. 1981PTPortuguese footballer and manager
- Ryan Mendes da Graçab. 1990CVCape Verdean footballer
- Lucas Michel Mendesb. 1990BRBrazilian and Qatari association football player
- Camila Mendesb. 1994USAmerican actress
- Shawn Mendesb. 1998CACanadian singer
- Nuno Mendesb. 2002PTPortuguese footballer (born 2002)
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 50 sources across 30 countries.
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 surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 171 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Mendes?
- We estimate roughly 430 thousand people bear Mendes (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
- In which country does Mendes have the most bearers?
- Mendes is most frequently recorded in Mexico, where it is most often spelled mendez.
- How common is Mendes compared with other names?
- In Mexico, Mendes is the 33rd most common surname of 198,716 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Mendes mean?
- Recorded meaning: patronymic from the personal name Mendo, a reduced form of Menendo (see Menendez).
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mendesThe 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
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, “Mendes” — the 33rd most common surname in Mexico. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.