Maldonado
surname · Latin script
Meaning: 1. nickname for an ugly or stupid person, from Spanish mal donado ‘ill-favored’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/maldonado/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Maldonado is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Honduras it is the 22nd most common surname.
- HNHonduras≈1 in 234(inferred from the name graph)
- ECEcuador1 in 366
- ARArgentina1 in 483
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- #449 (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 442 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 234 (inferred from the name graph)
121,526 people, 2010
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Honduras, est.
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)
1. nickname for an ugly or stupid person, from Spanish mal donado ‘ill-favored’. The phrase is a compound of mal ‘badly’ + donado ‘given’, ‘endowed’, past participle of donare ‘to give’, ‘to bestow’. 2. habitational name from Maldonado, a village in the province of Albacete.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Maldonado 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #742 | 121,526 | 1 in 2.7K | 122K | Maldonado | 442 |
| AR Argentina | #69 | 94,140 | 1 in 483 | 94K | Maldonado | 136 |
| EC Ecuador | #33 | 46,166 | 1 in 366 | 46K | Maldonado | 90 |
| HN Honduras | #22 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 234 | — | Maldonado | 69 |
| CO Colombia | #197 | ≈37,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | 26 | Maldonado | 162 |
| PY Paraguay | #587 | ≈15,000 est. | ≈1 in 489 | — | Maldonado | 57 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 6,147 | 1 in 551 | 6.1K | — | 68 |
121,526 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; the co-datosgov-candidates register; INEC — civil registry names; 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)
Maldonado is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Spanish, son, from Sp. mal donado ill-favoured. The phrase is a cpd of mal badly (L 7nale, a deriv. of malus', see Malo) + donado given, endowed (L donatus, past part, of donare-, cf. Matkiewicz see Maly Donat).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
Brasil, Portugal, Ciudad de Mexico; bad donated
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
In Latvian, pilsēta Urugvajā, departamenta administratīvais centrs, 54600 iedzīvotāju (2004. g.)
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Oliverio Maldonadob. 1932ECEcuadorian actor (1932-)
- Joe Exoticb. 1963USnot in their usual nameAmerican zoo operator, internet personality, and musician
- Jay Hernandezb. 1978MXnot in their usual nameMexican actor
- Darío Verónb. 1979PYnot in their usual nameParaguayan footballer
- Sara Maldonadob. 1980MXMexican actress
- Giancarlo Maldonadob. 1982VEVenezuelan footballer
- Allen Maldonadob. 1983USAmerican actor, filmmaker and entrepreneur
- Pastor Maldonadob. 1985VEVenezuelan racing driver
- Kirstin Maldonadob. 1992USAmerican singer
- Denil Maldonadob. 1998HNHonduran association football player
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 40 sources across 23 countries.
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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)
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 Maldonado come from?
- 1. nickname for an ugly or stupid person, from Spanish mal donado ‘ill-favored’. The phrase is a compound of mal ‘badly’ + donado ‘given’, ‘endowed’, past participle of donare ‘to give’, ‘to bestow’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Maldonado?
- A machine transcription gives /maldonado/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- In which country does Maldonado have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 122 thousand people named Maldonado, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled maldonado.
- What does the name Maldonado mean?
- Recorded meaning: 1. nickname for an ugly or stupid person, from Spanish mal donado ‘ill-favored’.
- How common is the name Maldonado?
- In the United States, the national register counted 121,526 people named Maldonado in 2010, about 1 in 2.7 thousand residents.
- How common is Maldonado compared with other names?
- In the United States, Maldonado is the 742nd most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Maldonado?
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/maldonadoThe 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, “Maldonado” — the 742nd most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.