Hugo
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: Germanic hypocoristic from names in hugi/hugu ‘spirit, intellect, mind, thought’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Hugo is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Argentina than in any other country, where it is the 45th most common given name.
- PYParaguay≈1 in 170(inferred from the name graph)
- ARArgentina≈1 in 193
- PTPortugal≈1 in 232
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.
- Argentina (inferred from the name graph)
- #365 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 440 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 170 (inferred from the name graph)
≈240,000 people, est.
of 15M given names
Highest-authority source
Paraguay, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Germanic hypocoristic from names in hugi/hugu ‘spirit, intellect, mind, thought’.
Sources 1
- Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios
Attested across 9 languages in the etymology graph.
How Hugo is read(measured from records)
Hugo is one spelling over 4 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.
- Spanish69%
Germanic hypocoristic from names in hugi/hugu ‘spirit, intellect, mind, thought’.
as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios
- French10%
From Germanic hug, 'mind, spirit'; St Hugh.
as a nameDictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
- Portuguese8.3%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Hugo in Portuguese.
- English5.6%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Hugo in English.
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Hugo 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AR Argentina | #45 | ≈240,000 est. | ≈1 in 193 | 282 | Hugo | 172 |
| BR Brazil | #168 | 114,803 | 1 in 1.8K | 115K | Hugo | 218 |
| FR France | — | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 636 | 155K | Hugo | 9 |
| ES Spain | #232 | 102,296 | 1 in 489 | 102K | Hugo | 208 |
| PE Peru | #62 | ≈69,000 est. | ≈1 in 461 | — | Hugo | 127 |
| PT Portugal | #40 | ≈44,000 est. | ≈1 in 232 | listed | Hugo | 206 |
| PY Paraguay | #19 | ≈42,000 est. | ≈1 in 170 | — | Hugo | 76 |
| EC Ecuador | #39 | 40,164 | 1 in 421 | 40K | Hugo | 87 |
| SE Sweden | — | 36,476 | 1 in 280 | 36K | Hugo | 59 |
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: RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INEC — civil registry names; the pt-irn-lista-nomes register; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Hugo 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 German, from a Germanic short form of a name with *hug- 'mind, spirit'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In German, from the given name Hugo, from Germanic *hug- 'mind, thought'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
Latinized form of Hugh, used throughout the Middle Ages in official HULDA documents, and occasionally revived as a modern given name. Hulda ° Biblical name (meaning ‘weasel’ in Hebrew}, borne by a prophetess who foretold to Josiah the destruction of Jerusalem (2 Kings 22). Variant: Huldah.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
from a short form of any of the Germanic compound personal names with the first element hug ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ (see Hugh).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Hugh the Greatb. 898FRnot in their usual nameDuke of the Franks and Count of Paris (c. 898–956)
- Hugues Capetb. 940FRnot in their usual nameKing of the Franks
- Grotiusb. 1583NLnot in their usual nameDutch jurist and scholar (1583-1645)
- Hugo de Vriesb. 1848NLDutch botanist (1848-1935)
- Alvar Aaltob. 1898FInot in their usual nameFinnish architect and designer (1898–1976)
- Hugo Clausb. 1929BEBelgian author (1929–2008)
- Hugo Chávezb. 1954VEVenezuelan politician, 56th president of Venezuela (1954–2013)
- Hugo Sánchezb. 1958MXMexican footballer and manager
- Hugo Llorisb. 1986FRFrench footballer (born 1986)
- Hugo Ekitikeb. 2002FRFrench footballer (born 2002)
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 142 sources across 67 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024) | 2024 | 155K | #24 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 115K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 114K | #283 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 102K | #88 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 101K | #473 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 93K | #52 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — civil registry names | 2024 | 40K | #53 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 36K | #115 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 19K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 8.3K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 657 | #283 |
| PT Portugal | IRN — Lista de Nomes Próprios admitidos | — | — | — |
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
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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
- Is Hugo a male or female name?
- Hugo is a male 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 does the name Hugo mean, and where does it come from?
- Germanic hypocoristic from names in hugi/hugu ‘spirit, intellect, mind, thought’. Recorded by Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios.
- In which country does Hugo have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 236 thousand people named Hugo in Argentina, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hugo.
- What are other forms of the name Hugo?
- In the etymology graph, Hugh, Hugues and Ugo are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How common is the name Hugo?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 114,803 people named Hugo in 2022, about 1 in 1.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Hugo compared with other names?
- In Argentina, Hugo is the 45th most common given name of 119,825 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hugo?
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/hugoThe 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, “Hugo” — the 45th most common given name in Argentina. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.