Guerra
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: war, warfare
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɡera/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Guerra is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country. In Guatemala it is the 15th most common surname.
- VEVenezuela≈1 in 429(inferred from the name graph)
- SVEl Salvador≈1 in 582
- GTGuatemala≈1 in 607
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.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- #626 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 420 (measured from records)
- 1 in 353 (inferred from the name graph)
99,757 people
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
nickname for a belligerent person or for a soldier, from guerra ‘war’. In some cases the Italian name may represent a short form of various compound personal names containing this element, for example Vinciguerra. The Iberian name may in some cases reflect a misinterpretation of the Basque base ezquerra, esquerra, from esker ‘left-handed’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
How Guerra is read(measured from records)
Guerra is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Spanish63%
war, warfare
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English18%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Guerra in English.
- Portuguese8.2%
war (organised, large-scale armed conflict)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Guerra 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | #221 | 99,757 | 1 in 2.1K | 100K | Guerra | 190 |
| US United States | — | 70,071 | 1 in 4.7K | 70K | Guerra | 420 |
| VE Venezuela | #77 | ≈67,000 est. | ≈1 in 429 | — | Guerra | 97 |
| PE Peru | #85 | ≈48,000 est. | ≈1 in 669 | — | Guerra | 120 |
| CO Colombia | #167 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.2K | 35 | Guerra | 159 |
| GT Guatemala | #15 | ≈28,000 est. | ≈1 in 607 | — | Guerra | 86 |
| SV El Salvador | #91 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 582 | — | Guerra | 54 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 9,599 | 1 in 353 | 9.6K | — | 70 |
99,757 people counted by IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); the co-datosgov-candidates register; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)
Guerra 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.
nickname for a belligerent person or for a soldier, from guerra ‘war’. In some cases the Italian name may represent a short form of various compound personal names containing this element, for example Vinciguerra. The Iberian name may in some cases reflect a misinterpretation of the Basque base ezquerra, esquerra, from esker ‘left-handed’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Castilianized form of Basque Gerra, a topographic name for someone who lived in a break or depression in a range of hills, from Basque gerri ‘waist’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Italian, do germânico werra; referência à guerra ou a um guerreiro bravo
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In Italian, Dal germanico guerra «lotta, combattimento».
as a nameDizionario Dei Nomi e Cognomi Italiani
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)
- Tonino Guerrab. 1920ITItalian concentration camp survivor, poet, writer and screenwriter (1920-2012)
- Ruy Guerrab. 1931PTBrazilian-Mozambican film director and actor (born 1931)
- Anna Maria Ferrerob. 1935FRnot in their usual nameItalian actress (1935-2018)
- Cástulo Guerrab. 1945ARArgentine actor
- Blanca Guerrab. 1953MXMexican actress (born 1953)
- Juan Luis Guerrab. 1957DODominican musician
- Andrea Guerrab. 1961ITItalian composer
- Ciro Guerrab. 1981COColombian film director and screenwriter
- Nicolás Maduro Guerrab. 1990VEVenezuelan politician and son of Nicolás Maduro
- Ana Guerrab. 1994ESSpanish pop singer (born 1994)
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 51 sources across 30 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 100K | #278 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 70K | #473 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 68K | #477 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 55K | #554 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 9.6K | — |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 35 | #81 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
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
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- 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 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Guerra come from?
- nickname for a belligerent person or for a soldier, from guerra ‘war’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What does the name Guerra mean?
- In Spanish, war, warfare
- How do you pronounce Guerra?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡera/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- What are other forms of the name Guerra?
- In the etymology graph, Guerreiro, Guerriero and Guerrera are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Guerra have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 100 thousand people named Guerra, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled guerra.
- Where is Guerra most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Guerra is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 353 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Guerra?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 99,757 people named Guerra, about 1 in 2.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Guerra compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Guerra is the 221st most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Guerra?
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/guerraThe 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, “Guerra” — the 221st most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.