Cárdenas
loc · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Cárdenas is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Colombia than in any other country, where it is the 50th most common surname. Recorded meaning: From cárdenas, of Andalusian Arabic origin.
- PEPeru≈1 in 367(inferred from the name graph)
- COColombia≈1 in 399
- ECEcuador1 in 409
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Colombia (inferred from the name graph)
- #447 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 429 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 367 (inferred from the name graph)
≈120,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Peru, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Cardenas in US United States, PE Peru, CO Colombia and 3 more.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
From cárdenas, of Andalusian Arabic origin.
Sources 1
Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Cárdenas counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CO Colombia | #50 | ≈120,000 est. | ≈1 in 399 | 77 | Cardenas | 186 |
| PE Peru | #52 | ≈87,000 est. | ≈1 in 367 | — | Cardenas | 134 |
| US United States | #492 | 77,652 | 1 in 4.3K | 78K | Cardenas | 429 |
| EC Ecuador | #63 | 41,334 | 1 in 409 | 41K | Cardenas | 79 |
| VE Venezuela | #142 | ≈36,000 est. | ≈1 in 788 | — | Cardenas | 99 |
| CL Chile | #156 | ≈24,000 est. | ≈1 in 752 | 2 | Cardenas | 128 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; the co-datosgov-candidates register; SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021); INEC — civil registry names. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Cárdenas is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Spanish, feminine plural of cárdeno
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.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Lázaro Cárdenasb. 1895MX51st President of Mexico
- Luis Miramontesb. 1925MXnot in their usual nameMexican chemist (1925–2072)
- Elsa Cárdenasb. 1935MXMexican actress
- Hector de Jesus Ruizb. 1945MXnot in their usual nameMexican businessman
- Roberto Mollb. 1948PEnot in their usual namePeruvian actor
- Tony Cárdenasb. 1963USAmerican politician
- Osiel Cárdenas Guillénb. 1967MXMexican drug lord incarcerated in a US federal prison
- Javier Valdez Cárdenasb. 1967MXMexican crime journalist and murder victim (1967–2017)
- Nery Brenesb. 1985CRnot in their usual nameCosta Rican sprinter
- Jorge Gutiérrezb. 1988MXnot in their usual nameMexican basketball player (born 1988)
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(measured from records)
Attested in 11 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 4 | #112 |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Cárdenas mean, and where does it come from?
- From cárdenas, of Andalusian Arabic origin. Recorded by Wiktionary.
- In which country does Cárdenas have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 123 thousand people named Cárdenas in Colombia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cardenas.
- How common is the name Cárdenas?
- In the United States, the national register counted 77,652 people named Cárdenas in 2010, about 1 in 4.3 thousand residents.
- How common is Cárdenas compared with other names?
- In Colombia, Cárdenas is the 50th most common surname of 144,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Cárdenas?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/c%C3%A1rdenasThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
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, “Cárdenas” — the 50th most common surname in Colombia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.