Morales
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: plural of moral
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Morales is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Chile it is the 9th most common surname.
- SVEl Salvador≈1 in 168(inferred from the name graph)
- ECEcuador1 in 180
- CLChile≈1 in 182
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)
- #121 (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 535 (measured from records)
- 1 in 71 (inferred from the name graph)
311,777 people, 2010
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Costa Rica
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)
‘Person who lives among mulberry trees’, from Spanish morales ‘mulberry trees’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
How Morales is read(measured from records)
Morales is one spelling over 2 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.
- Spanish71%
plural of moral
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English15%
‘Person who lives among mulberry trees’, from Spanish morales ‘mulberry trees’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Morales 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 | #220 | 311,777 | 1 in 1.1K | 312K | Morales | 535 |
| CO Colombia | #25 | ≈200,000 est. | ≈1 in 251 | 105 | Morales | 223 |
| PH Philippines | #56 | ≈140,000 est. | ≈1 in 756 | — | Morales | 140 |
| AR Argentina | #36 | 133,503 | 1 in 341 | 134K | Morales | 144 |
| ES Spain | #31 | 127,848 | 1 in 391 | 128K | Morales | 247 |
| CL Chile | #9 | ≈100,000 est. | ≈1 in 182 | 1 | Morales | 182 |
| EC Ecuador | — | 93,945 | 1 in 180 | 94K | Morales | 112 |
| CR Costa Rica | — | 71,778 | 1 in 71 | 72K | — | 138 |
| SV El Salvador | #28 | ≈39,000 est. | ≈1 in 168 | 40K | Morales | 88 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 34,674 | 1 in 98 | 35K | — | 98 |
311,777 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021); the co-datosgov-candidates register; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); El Salvador top-100 surnames (surnam.es / RNPN-derived); INEC — civil registry names; TSE — electoral roll (padrón) 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)
Morales 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.
Spanish; topographic name from the plural of moral ‘mulberry tree’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
muros, de murales; from the walls
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
In Latin, nominative/accusative/vocative masculine/feminine plural of mōrālis
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In French, feminine plural of moral
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)
- Baltasar Graciánb. 1604ESnot in their usual nameAragonese Jesuit and baroque prose writer and philosopher in Castilian language (1601-1658)
- Francisco Morales Bermúdezb. 1921PE51st President of Peru (1921–2022)
- Jacobo Moralesb. 1934USPuerto Rican actor
- Evo Moralesb. 1959BOpresident of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019
- Esai Moralesb. 1962USAmerican actor
- Jimmy Moralesb. 1969GTComedian and former President of Guatemala
- Natalie Moralesb. 1972USAmerican journalist
- Natalie Moralesb. 1985USAmerican actress
- María Gabriela Islerb. 1988VEnot in their usual nameVenezuelan model and beauty pageant titleholder
- Ana Guerrab. 1994ESnot in their usual nameSpanish 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 57 sources across 31 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 312K | #63 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 311K | #62 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 218K | #90 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 134K | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 128K | #29 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 128K | #29 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — civil registry names | 2024 | 94K | #24 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | — | 94K | — |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 72K | #14 |
| SV El Salvador | El Salvador top-100 surnames (surnam.es / RNPN-derived) | — | 40K | #30 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 35K | — |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 1995 | 1.9K | — |
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 Morales come from?
- ‘Person who lives among mulberry trees’, from Spanish morales ‘mulberry trees’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What does the name Morales mean?
- In Spanish, plural of moral
- In which country does Morales have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 312 thousand people named Morales, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled morales.
- Where is Morales most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Morales is densest in Costa Rica — about 1 in 71 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Morales?
- In the United States, the national register counted 311,777 people named Morales in 2010, about 1 in 1.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Morales compared with other names?
- In the United States, Morales is the 220th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Morales?
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/moralesThe 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, “Morales” — the 220th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.