Alvarez

surname · Latin script

Meaning: empréstimo do espanhol; patronímico, filho de Álvaro

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

/alβaɾes/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Alvarez is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Spain than in any other country, where it is the 16th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • ESSpain1 in 178(measured from records)
  • VEVenezuela≈1 in 179
  • ARArgentina1 in 213

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.

Spain (measured from records)

281,150 people

#115 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

3 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
533 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 57 (inferred from the name graph)

Uruguay

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

AlvarezLatin(measured from records)
АльваресCyrillic(measured from records)
ΑλβαρεζGreek(measured from records)

2 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Àlvarez in UY Uruguay, CR Costa Rica.

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)

recorded in Portuguese

empréstimo do espanhol; patronímico, filho de Álvaro

Sources 1

  • Dicionário dos sobrenomes italianos

Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Alvarez 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.

Where Alvarez is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
ES Spain#16281,1501 in 178281KAlvarez264
US United States#103233,9831 in 1.4K234KAlvarez533
AR Argentina#15213,9781 in 213214KAlvarez186
CO Colombia#20≈210,000 est.≈1 in 236149Alvarez209
VE Venezuela#25≈160,000 est.≈1 in 1791.3KAlvarez122
UY Uruguay—59,7671 in 5760KÀlvarez116
CR Costa Rica—49,7821 in 10250KÀlvarez136

281,150 people counted by INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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); asosab — SAIME ID-card names (1896–1996); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); the co-datosgov-candidates register; 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Alvarez is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Catalan surname6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Andorra, Argentina, Spain

    Also written Àlvarez, Álvarez, Álvárez, Alvárez

  • a separate name10 spellings in the group

    Also written Älvarez, Álvarez, Ãlvarez, Álvárez, Alvárez

  • Polish surname45 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Spain, Peru, Bolivia

    Languages: Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian

    Also written Alvares, Àlvarez, Álvarêž, Ãlvarez, Алварес

  • Lao surname37 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Laos, United States, Thailand, Peru

    Languages: Lao, Thai

    Also written Àlvarez, Älvärëz, อัลวาเรซ, Älvarez, Alvaréz

  • Danish surname7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Spain, Denmark, Sweden

    Languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian

    Also written Ãlvarez, Álvarez

88 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Alvarez is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Italian, Variante di Alvaro

    as a nameDizionario dei cognomi italiani

  • In Croatian, američki eksperimentalni fizičar, za otkriće rezonantnih čestica (subatomskih čestica s iznimno kratkim životnim vijekom koje se pojavljuju samo u visoko energetskim nuklearnim kolizijama) Nobelova nagrada 1968.

    as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export

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)

1400160018002000John of the Cross, b. 1542Manuel de Godoy, b. 1767Luis Walter Alvarez, b. 1911Luis Echeverría, b. 1922Koldo Álvarez, b. 1970Fede Álvarez, b. 1978Rafael Márquez, b. 1979Eddie Alvarez, b. 1984Adrián López Álvarez, b. 1988Julián Álvarez, b. 2000

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)

FormalEstimado/a Alvarez,Dear Alvarez, (English)
InformalEstimado/a Alvarez,Hello, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 58 sources across 30 countries.

Official registers attesting Alvarez
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—281K#17
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—281K#17
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010234K#92
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020229K#95
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—214K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000169K#132
UY UruguayINE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public)—60K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—50K#39
CO ColombiaColombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co)—149#20
CR Costa RicaTSE — Consulta de nombres (Padrón Nacional Electoral name enumeration)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

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

How do you pronounce Alvarez?
A machine transcription gives /alβaɾes/ (IPA) for Spanish.
What does the name Alvarez mean?
Recorded meaning: empréstimo do espanhol; patronímico, filho de Álvaro
In which country does Alvarez have the most bearers?
In Spain, the national register counted about 281 thousand people named Alvarez, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled alvarez.
Where is Alvarez most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Alvarez is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 57 people — even though Spain holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Alvarez?
In Spain, the national register counted 281,150 people named Alvarez, about 1 in 178 residents.
How common is Alvarez compared with other names?
In Spain, Alvarez is the 16th most common surname of 395,154 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Alvarez?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/alvarez

The 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, “Alvarez” — the 16th most common surname in Spain. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Alvarez parses inside a full name →