Names of Portugal PT

IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023) records Maria as the commonest given name in Portugal; the names that most distinguish Portugal from the rest of the world are Silva, Rui and Nuno.

Written in Portuguese.

Population: 10M
Official registers: 1
Name forms recorded: 26K

BBuilt from 1 official register (2024), 26,075 name forms in our corpus, 3 cited works.

At least one official register, 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.

fewerlarger share

Where the names most characteristic of Portugal are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Portugal included.

How names work in Portugal

2 naming traditions are in use in Portugal, 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 Portugal

Year2024

Counts not recorded by the publisher · authority tier 2

IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023), 2024 — 10 given names counted over a population the publisher did not record, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#	Name	Bearers recorded	Our rank
1	Maria	4.3K	—
2	Alice	992	75
3	Benedita	973	108
4	Matilde	942	70
5	Leonor	913	63
6	Carolina	709	51
7	Aurora	697	—
8	Camila	598	—
9	Margarida	586	38
10	Beatriz	551	37

Where the two lists disagree

10 of IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023)'s top 10 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.

IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023), 2024 on the left; every record we hold for Portugal on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

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 Portugal

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Portugal 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.

Sized by how much of the difference between Portugal's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Over time

IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023), 2017–2024 (8 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

The best-attested names in Portugal, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

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

IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023)2024headline (given)
Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (IRN). Counts: not recorded. given. 20 forms. 2017–2024. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
What we know about this register
Top 20 given names per year by sex (birth registrations). Columns: ID, Ano (year), NOME (name), TOTAL (count). Published by IRN on dados.justica.gov.pt, mirrored on dados.gov.pt.
Last verified 2026-05-09.

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.

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 Portugal?: Maria, according to IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023) (2024), with 4,295 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Portugal?: Because they count different people. IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023) (2024) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Maria. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Jose. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Portugal?: 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 Portugal”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/PT (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from IRN — Nomes próprios mais frequentes (2017–2023).