Mussel
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from OE muscelle ‘mussel, shell-fish’, probably metonymic for a gatherer; first attested Mathias Muscel 1230 P (L)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: Familienaam.be, 2008
/musɛl/(machine-generated) Portuguese · model-generated · uncertain
Mussel is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- BRBrazil1 in 468K(measured from records)
- ARArgentina1 in 4.5M
- BEBelgium1 in 12M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 76 (measured from records)
- 1 in 468K (inferred from the name graph)
452 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)from OE muscelle ‘mussel, shell-fish’, probably metonymic for a gatherer; first attested Mathias Muscel 1230 P (L)
Cited for this meaning 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Mussel 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 | 452 | 1 in 468K | 452 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 10 | 1 in 4.5M | 10 | — | — |
| BE Belgium | 1 | 1 in 12M | 1 | — | — |
| FR France | — | — | 12 | Mussel | 76 |
| US United States | — | — | listed | — | 1 |
452 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); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register. 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)Mussel 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 English, Any of several groups of bivalve shellfish with elongated, asymmetrical shells.
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.
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)8 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 452 | #18,650 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1941 | 29 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1961 | 22 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1951 | 22 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1911 | 20 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1971 | 16 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1931 | 15 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1901 | 15 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1921 | 14 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 12 | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 10 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1981 | 10 | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
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 are other forms of the name Mussel?
- In the etymology graph, Mouse is a form of the same name in other languages.
- What does the name Mussel mean, and where does it come from?
- from OE muscelle ‘mussel, shell-fish’, probably metonymic for a gatherer; first attested Mathias Muscel 1230 P (L) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Mussel?
- It depends on the language: in Portuguese /musɛl/; in English /ˈmʌsəl/ (Wiktionary). Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- In which country does Mussel have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 452 people named Mussel, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Mussel most common?
- Mussel is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 468 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Mussel?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 452 people named Mussel, about 1 in 468 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Mussel?
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/musselThe 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, “Mussel”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.