Bento

surname · Latin script

Meaning, in Portuguese: holy, sacred

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

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

Bento is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 128K(measured from records)
  • GYGuyana1 in 5.4K
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 22K

carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

2,596 people, 2010

Sources
201 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 5.4K (inferred from the name graph)

Guyana

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

A Japanese takeaway lunch served in a box, often with the food arranged into an elaborate design.

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 19 languages in the etymology graph.

How Bento is read(measured from records)

Bento 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.

  • Portuguese86%

    holy, sacred

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • English5.1%

    A Japanese takeaway lunch served in a box, often with the food arranged into an elaborate design.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)

Bento 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 Bento is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—2,5961 in 128K2.6KBento201
AR Argentina—1,1661 in 39K1.2K—1
ES Spain—4691 in 107K469Bento17
CH Switzerland—3821 in 22K382Bento18
UY Uruguay—1501 in 23K150——
GY Guyana#6261391 in 5.4K139Bento2

2,596 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); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)

Bento is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Bentô

61 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)

Bento 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.

  • blessed; principal place: Portugal

    as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…

  • In Indonesian, bento, a Japanese takeaway lunch served in a box, often with the food arranged into an elaborate design

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Esperanto, benthos (The flora and fauna at the bottom of the ocean or other body of water.)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In mwl, wind

    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)

19201940196019802000Serge Bento, b. 1931Marlene José Bento, b. 1938Manuel Bento, b. 1948Vítor Bento, b. 1954María del Carmen Hernández Bento, b. 1963Paulo Bento, b. 1969Clóvis Bento da Cruz, b. 1970Alex Bento, b. 1970Rui Bento, b. 1972Josh Bento, b. 1993

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)

FormalPrezado Sr. Bento,Dear Mr Bento, (English)
InformalOlá Bento,Hi Bento, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 59 sources across 30 countries.

Official registers attesting Bento
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020102.6K#12,025
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.7K#16,512
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020001.7K#15,954
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—1.2K—
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—469#8,445
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—469#8,440
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)2024382#3,438
UY UruguayINE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public)—150—
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 20252025139#486

Reference works 4

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)

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 Bento?
A machine transcription gives /bẽtu/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
Where does the name Bento come from?
A Japanese takeaway lunch served in a box, often with the food arranged into an elaborate design. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
How common is the name Bento?
In the United States, the national register counted 2,596 people named Bento in 2010, about 1 in 128 thousand residents.
How common is Bento compared with other names?
In Guyana, Bento is the 626th most common surname of 15,834 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Bento mean?
In Portuguese, holy, sacred
What are other forms of the name Bento?
In the etymology graph, Bennett, Benedict and Benedetto are forms of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Bento have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 2.6 thousand people named Bento, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bento.
Where is Bento most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Bento is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 5.4 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.

What do you want to know about Bento?

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

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, “Bento” — the 626th most common surname in Guyana. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Bento parses inside a full name →