Mota

surname · Latin script

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

Mota is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country, where it is the 79th most common surname. In Portuguese, recorded as motorcycle.

rarermore common
  • BRBrazil1 in 415(measured from records)
  • DODominican Republic≈1 in 503
  • PTPortugal≈1 in 581

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 (measured from records)

510,309 people

#908 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

3 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
313 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 415 (inferred from the name graph)

Brazil

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

MotaLatin(measured from records)
МотаCyrillic(measured from records)
ΜοταGreek(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)

habitational name from places in the provinces of Cuenca and Valladolid named Mota. 3, Catalan: topographic name from mota ‘hillock’, denoting someone who lived by a hillock.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.

How Mota is read(measured from records)

Mota 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.

  • Portuguese67%

    motorcycle

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

  • Spanish23%

    speck (tiny spot or particle), mote

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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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

Mota 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 Mota is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
BR Brazil#79510,3091 in 415510KMota218
VE Venezuela#213≈24,000 est.≈1 in 1.2K—Mota64
DO Dominican Republic#59≈21,000 est.≈1 in 503—Mota78
PT Portugal#56≈18,000 est.≈1 in 581—Mota156
US United States—14,1821 in 23K14KMota313
AO Angola#93≈7,100 est.≈1 in 4.6K1Mota30

510,309 people counted by IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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 — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family 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)

Mota is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Philippines, Canada

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Mötä, Motá, Moetae, Motä, Mota'

  • French surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, Portugal

    Also written Mõtã, Môtà, Moța, Môtå, Motà

  • Hindi surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, United Kingdom, Pakistan

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu

    Also written Môtâ

  • a separate name7 spellings in the group

    Also written Möta, Mota̧, Motā, Moța, Moţa

69 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)

Mota 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.

  • habitational name from places in the provinces of Cuenca and Valladolid named Mota. 3, Catalan: topographic name from mota ‘hillock’, denoting someone who lived by a hillock.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • topographic name for someone who lived by a fortified stronghold, from mot(t)a, a borrowing from Old French motte (see Motte 1).

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, Rosa, Portuguese marathoner

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • habitational name from places in Girona and Valencia.

    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)

1850190019502000José Vianna da Motta, b. 1868Rosa Mota, b. 1958Josefina Vázquez Mota, b. 1961José Mota, b. 1965Formiga, b. 1978Renan Mota, b. 1991Bernardo Silva, b. 1994Bethany Mota, b. 1995Nino, b. 1997Francisco Trincão, b. 1999

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 46 sources across 28 countries.

Official registers attesting Mota
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—510K#89
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202014K#2,447
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201014K#2,547
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200010K#3,251
AO AngolaWikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names—1#284
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 7

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 Mota come from?
habitational name from places in the provinces of Cuenca and Valladolid named Mota. 3, Catalan: topographic name from mota ‘hillock’, denoting someone who lived by a hillock. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
What does the name Mota mean?
In Portuguese, motorcycle
In which country does Mota have the most bearers?
In Brazil, the national register counted about 510 thousand people named Mota, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mota.
Where is Mota most common?
Mota is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 415 people carrying it.
How common is the name Mota?
In Brazil, the national register counted 510,309 people named Mota, about 1 in 415 residents.
How common is Mota compared with other names?
In Brazil, Mota is the 79th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Mota?

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

The same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.

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, “Mota” — the 79th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Mota parses inside a full name →