Moreira
surname · Latin script
Meaning: habitational name from any of the numerous places in Portugal and Galicia called Moreira, from moreira ‘mulberry tree’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/muɾejɾɐ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Moreira is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country, where it is the 46th most common surname.
- UYUruguay1 in 89(measured from records)
- ECEcuador1 in 186
- PTPortugal≈1 in 200
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 (inferred from the name graph)
- #505 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 340 (measured from records)
- 1 in 89 (inferred from the name graph)
≈640,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
Highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
habitational name from any of the numerous places in Portugal and Galicia called Moreira, from moreira ‘mulberry tree’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Moreira 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 | #46 | ≈640,000 est. | ≈1 in 330 | 317 | Moreira | 261 |
| EC Ecuador | #19 | 91,081 | 1 in 186 | 91K | Moreira | 79 |
| PT Portugal | #31 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 200 | — | Moreira | 191 |
| UY Uruguay | #16 | 38,055 | 1 in 89 | 38K | Moreira | 81 |
| AR Argentina | #241 | 27,787 | 1 in 1.6K | 28K | Moreira | 99 |
| CR Costa Rica | #170 | 4,491 | 1 in 1.1K | 4.5K | Moreira | 60 |
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: IBGE — Nomes (census name API); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INEC — civil registry names; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) 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)
Moreira 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 Galician, mulberry tree
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)
- Delfim Moreirab. 1868BR10th president of Brazil (1868-1920)
- Airto Moreirab. 1941BRBrazilian drummer and percussionist
- Gilberto Gilb. 1942BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian recording artist, singer, guitarist, songwriter and politician
- Manuela Bravob. 1957PTnot in their usual namePortuguese singer (1957-)
- Daniel Moreirab. 1977FRFrench footballer (born 1977)
- Ronaldinhob. 1980BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian associaton fooball player (born 1980)
- Ana Moreirab. 1980PTPortuguese actress
- Leonardo Moreirab. 1986JPJapanese association football player
- David Luizb. 1987BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian association football player
- Steven Moreirab. 1994FRCape Verdean and French footballer
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 45 sources across 27 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 317 | #19,070 |
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 293 | #8,960 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 171 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 148 | #28,378 |
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 45 | #37,076 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 1980 | 27 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 23 | #28,378 |
Reference works 6
- 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)
- 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
- What does the name Moreira mean, and where does it come from?
- habitational name from any of the numerous places in Portugal and Galicia called Moreira, from moreira ‘mulberry tree’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Moreira?
- A machine transcription gives /muɾejɾɐ/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
- In which country does Moreira have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 642 thousand people named Moreira in Brazil, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled moreira.
- Where is Moreira most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Moreira is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 89 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Moreira?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 91,081 people named Moreira in 2024, about 1 in 186 residents.
- How common is Moreira compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Moreira is the 46th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Moreira?
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/moreiraThe 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, “Moreira” — the 46th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.