María
given name · Latin script
Meaning: From Hebrew Miriam, name of Moses’ sister and Aaron’s sister
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/maɾia/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
María is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country, where it is the most common given name.
- ECEcuador1 in 16(measured from records)
- SVEl Salvador≈1 in 16
- BRBrazil1 in 17
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than María itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- #1 (measured from records)
- 11 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 679 (measured from records)
- 1 in 16 (inferred from the name graph)
12,284,478 people, 2022
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Ecuador
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
13 other spellings are counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Maria in BR Brazil, AR Argentina, EC Ecuador and 1 more, Mary in US United States, PH Philippines, CZ Czechia and Мария in RU Russia.
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 Hebrew Miriam, name of Moses’ sister and Aaron’s sister.
Sources 1
- Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios
Attested across 29 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
María 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 | #1 | 12,284,478 | 1 in 17 | 12M | Maria | 306 |
| AR Argentina | #1 | ≈2,300,000 est. | ≈1 in 20 | 5.3K | Maria | 253 |
| RU Russia | #19 | ≈2,000,000 est. | ≈1 in 72 | #4 | Мария | 263 |
| US United States | #1 | 1,768,343as Mary | 1 in 188 | 1.8M | Mary | 679 |
| PH Philippines | #1 | ≈1,200,000 est. | ≈1 in 92 | 27K | Mary | 225 |
| EC Ecuador | #1 | 1,042,139 | 1 in 16 | 1M | Maria | 165 |
| CZ Czechia | #22 | 521,052as Marie | 1 in 21 | 521K | Mary | 130 |
| SV El Salvador | #2 | ≈410,000 est. | ≈1 in 16 | 627 | Maria | 110 |
12,284,478 people counted by IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror), 2022. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Top 500 First Names in the Philippines (PSA FOI response, tracking; INEC — civil registry names; This page discusses the popularity of names in Sonsonate, El Salvador, and Puno, Peru in the 1980s, published by Maybe i; MVČR — living population register 2017. 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)
María 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.
In Spanish, a female given name from Hebrew, equivalent to English Mary
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Amada, deseada; también estrella marina o amarga
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In Asturian, a female given name, equivalent to English Mary
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Catalan, María (town in Andalucia)
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)
- Anne d'Autricheb. 1601ESnot in their usual nameQueen, consort of Louis XIII, King of France, lived (1601-1666)
- Luisa de Guzmánb. 1613ESnot in their usual nameDuchess of Braganza; Queen consort of Portugal (1613-1666)
- Isabel II de Españab. 1830ESnot in their usual nameQueen of Spain from 1833 to 1868
- Alfonso XIIIb. 1886ESnot in their usual nameKing of Spain from 1886 to 1931 (1886–1941)
- José María Balcázarb. 1943PEPeruvian lawyer and politician, president of Peru (feb.-jul. 2026)
- Rosario Murillob. 1951NInot in their usual nameco-president of Nicaragua since 2025
- María Corina Machadob. 1967VEVenezuelan politician, activist and Nobel laureate (born 1967)
- Arantxa Sánchez Vicariob. 1971ESnot in their usual nameSpanish tennis player
- Cote de Pablob. 1979CLnot in their usual nameChilean-American actress
- José María Giménezb. 1995UYUruguayan 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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 53 sources across 30 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 12M | #1 |
| AR Argentina | datos.gob.ar — nombres.datos.gob.ar per-name lookup (1922–2015) | 2015 | 80 | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — births 1922–2015 (Kaggle mirror) | 2015 | 80 | — |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 30 | #2,590 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 15 | #2,198 |
| PH Philippines | Philippine given names (Schneider 1905, Project Gutenberg) | — | — | — |
| PH Philippines | Tagalog given names (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Wikipedia given-name 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 María mean, and where does it come from?
- From Hebrew Miriam, name of Moses’ sister and Aaron’s sister. Recorded by Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios.
- How do you pronounce María?
- A machine transcription gives /maɾia/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- What are other forms of the name María?
- In the etymology graph, Mary, Marie and Marilyn are forms of the same name in other languages; Maritza and Marita are recorded short or pet forms.
- How common is the name María?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 12,284,478 people named María in 2022, about 1 in 17 residents.
- How common is María compared with other names?
- In Brazil, María is the most common given name of 474,894 given names recorded there.
- In which country does María have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 12 million people named María, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled maria.
- Where is María most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, María is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 16 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- Is María a male or female name?
- María is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What do you want to know about María?
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/mar%C3%ADaThe 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, “María” — the most common given name in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.