Names of Brazil BR
IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) records Silva as the commonest surname in Brazil; the names that most distinguish Brazil from the rest of the world are Santos, Souza and Oliveira.
Written in Portuguese.
- Population
- 212M
- Official registers
- 5
- Name forms recorded
- 164K
Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.
The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.
How names work in Brazil
2 naming traditions are in use in Brazil, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.
The most common names in Brazil
This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lucimar | 75K | — |
| 2 | Valdeci | 72K | — |
| 3 | Nadir | 49K | — |
| 4 | Darci | 47K | — |
| 5 | Valdete | 43K | — |
| 6 | Juraci | 43K | — |
| 7 | Eli | 38K | — |
| 8 | Alcione | 31K | — |
| 9 | Adair | 28K | — |
| 10 | Ivanir | 27K | — |
| 11 | Rosimar | 26K | — |
| 12 | Dione | 25K | — |
| 13 | Valdenir | 20K | — |
| 14 | Nelci | 19K | — |
| 15 | Jaci | 17K | — |
| 16 | Adria | 16K | — |
| 17 | Eurides | 15K | — |
| 18 | Eloi | 15K | — |
| 19 | Joseli | 14K | — |
| 20 | Atila | 14K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
25 of IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.
Characteristic of Brazil
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Brazil holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.
Over time
Up to five names at a time.
Scripts & spelling
Countries whose names look alike
Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.
Registers & sources
Official registers
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 183,415 forms. 1930–2020. Licence: Open Data Brazil.
What we know about this register
Per-token REST lookup backing the public "Nomes no Brasil" 2022 Census tool -- distinct from the existing br-ibge-nomes-api (v2 API, ranking_qtd=1000 top-N only, 40 rows, fully subsumed by br-ibge-nomes -- see that entry's notes) and br-brasilio-genero-nomes (2010 census mirror, given names only). This is the FIRST surname source for Brazil in this lake (the 2022 census added surname data for the first time) and upgrades given-name coverage from a top-1000 stub to a full seed-driven crawl. Fully open/unauthenticated API -- no cookies, no WAF, works with plain curl/requests, ~40-85 req/s sustained at 20 workers with near-zero observed errors, responses edge-cached 7 days. tipo=nome returns a homens/mulheres sex split + national rank; tipo=sobrenome returns just frequencia + rank (no sex split, new in 2022). One query returns only one tipo -- given and surname counts require separate calls. GIVEN seed (~141K tokens) = union of tokens already normalized from br-brasilio-genero-nomes/br-ibge-kaggle-names/br-ibge-nomes/br-ibge-nomes-api + PT given names; confirmed exhausted 2026-08-06 (a 300-token random sample of parse_dict v4 pt-language GIVEN/PATRONYMIC candidates NOT already in this seed scored 0/300 against the live API, vs the seed's own ~87.5% hit rate, so it was not expanded). SURNAME seed bootstrapped from IBGE's own /busca/{prefixo} fuzzy-autocomplete walked over all 676 two-letter Portuguese-alphabet prefixes (no prior BR surname source existed to seed from) plus a short hardcoded list of very common Brazilian surnames -- EXPANDED 2026-08-06 by +526,775 tokens (958,547 -> 1,485,322) sourced from parse_dict v4 fused_posterior (lang=pt, label=SURNAME, count_raw>=5) after removing tokens already attempted and a small blacklist of Portuguese grammatical particles (de/da/do/dos/...) that leak into the SURNAME label from compound-name tokenization. A 300-token random sample of these new candidates scored 38/300 (12.7%) against the live API -- comparable to the pre-expansion seed's own ~11.5% hit rate, not lower quality -- and skews heavily toward immigrant-descent surnames (Japanese, Italian, Slavic, German) reflecting Brazil's diaspora composition (e.g. TAKIZAWA, KAGEYAMA, HOSAKA, KARCZESKI, MACKIEVICZ, UNTERBERGER all confirmed present in the live census). Harvest re-launched via br_censo2022_loop.sh (DONE sentinel removed to let the existing */15 cron entry resume it); expect ~1.5-2h of fetching given the observed ~80-85 req/s rate. Fetcher: scripts/fetch_br_ibge_censo2022.py (resumable; raw JSON cached under raw/BR/cache_given/ and raw/BR/cache_surname/). ENRICHED 2026-07-14 (no new fetches, re-parsed the same cached responses): every response already embeds a `decadas` decade-by-decade birth timeline (1930s-2020s, combined-sex, given names only, data_note=ibge_censo2022_decade) and a `top_ufs` state breakdown (both given and surname, data_note=ibge_censo2022_uf_top10) -- both were being silently discarded by the original parser and are now emitted as additional rows (row count 134,671 -> 738,758). CORRECTED 2026-08-06: `top_ufs` is NOT capped at 10 states -- verified live that the API always returns all 27 states per name (frequencia=0 ones are dropped by the parser, which is why the row count per name varies from 1 to 27), so the full 27-state breakdown IS already captured by this entry today. There is no separate IBGE /estados endpoint (confirmed 404 on /api/v3/nomes/2022/estados) -- the earlier note claiming one would be needed for full geographic coverage was incorrect and is retracted.
Last verified 2026-08-06.
- IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)2022headline (given)
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). Counts: residents. given. 61,511 forms. 1930–2022.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 349,667 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: ibge_2022_census_total
Last verified 2026-06-05.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). Counts: residents. given. 24,761 forms.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 64,621 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: ibge_censo_nomes
Last verified 2026-06-05.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). Counts: not recorded. given. 20 forms. Licence: Open Data Brazil.
What we know about this register
REST API returning name frequency by decade of birth and state (ranking_qtd=1000 top-N mode). Verified 2026-08-06: all 40 rows (top-20 given names per sex, all-time national ranking) are a strict subset of br-ibge-nomes -- every one of these 40 tokens is already present there with equal-or-higher counts (br-ibge-nomes queried the full per-name census endpoint against an 838K-token seed, which naturally captures more of each name's total than this ranking snapshot). SUPERSEDED by br-ibge-nomes for names/counts. The only content not duplicated elsewhere is the IBGE-authoritative top-20-per-sex national RANK number (1-20) -- br-ibge-nomes carries a 'rank' column too, but it is a locally computed sort-order artifact (range(1, len(df)+1) over its own output), not sourced from the API, so it disagrees with this entry's real ranking (e.g. MARIA: rank=1 here vs rank=5 in br-ibge-nomes). Kept for that narrow reason (like kr-kosis-2015's romanized-list carve-out) rather than removed. 2022 Census adds surname data for the first time (see br-ibge-censo2022-lookup, the v3 API, for that). Also available via Base dos Dados: https://basedosdados.org/dataset/br-ibge-nomes-brasil
Last verified 2026-08-06.
- Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA)not a population count
Brasil.IO (Álvaro Justen) mirroring IBGE. Counts: not recorded. given. 60,483 forms. Licence: CC-BY-SA.
What we know about this register
Brasil.IO mirror of IBGE Censo 2010 first-name frequencies. 100,787 spelling variants with male+female stock counts. Emitted as one row per (name, sex) where that-sex frequency > 0 → 111,416 NELMA rows (50,932 M + 60,484 F). Includes spelling variants grouped by canonical form. Complements br-ibge-nomes-api by providing the full 2010 census tail (api only exposes ranking endpoints).
Last verified 2026-05-19.
Cited works
Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.
- Cultural Atlasweb
- Surnam.esweb
- Wikipediaencyclopaedia
About this data
Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.
Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.
Questions
- What is the most common given name in Brazil?
- Lucimar, according to IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) (2022), with 75,108 bearers recorded.
- What is the most common surname in Brazil?
- Silva, according to IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname), with 34,030,104 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Brazil?
- Because they count different people. IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) (2022) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Lucimar. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Maria. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Brazil?
- No — 2 are described on this page (Portuguese, Tetum), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Brazil”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/BR (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror).