Paola
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Italian feminine of Paul; Lat
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Paola is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Italy than in any other country. In Colombia it is the 11th most common given name.
- ITItaly≈1 in 353(inferred from the name graph)
- COColombia≈1 in 374
- CLChile≈1 in 390
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.
- Italy (inferred from the name graph)
- #523 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 417 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 353 (inferred from the name graph)
≈180,000 people, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Italy, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
Italian feminine of Paul; Lat. paulus 'small'.
Sources 1
- Dictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Paola 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Italy | #785 | ≈180,000 est. | ≈1 in 353 | 143 | Paola | 153 |
| CO Colombia | #11 | ≈130,000 est. | ≈1 in 374 | 109 | Paola | 211 |
| AR Argentina | #102 | ≈90,000 est. | ≈1 in 503 | 107 | Paola | 158 |
| BR Brazil | #451 | 61,663 | 1 in 3.4K | 62K | Paola | 183 |
| CL Chile | #59 | ≈47,000 est. | ≈1 in 390 | 23 | Paola | 155 |
| BO Bolivia | #322 | ≈28,000 est. | ≈1 in 420 | — | Paola | 74 |
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); the co-datosgov-candidates register; SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend). 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)
Paola is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Italian, oriundo da cidade meridional de Paola; nome ligado ao lat. pabula
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In English, city; KS
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In French, Forme féminine italienne de Paul, du latin Paulus, « petit, humble ».
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
In French, Forme italienne de Paule; origine latine.
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
In German, weibl. Vom., italienische Form von
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
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)
- Paola Ruffo di Calabriab. 1937ITqueen consort of the Belgians
- Paola Pitagorab. 1941ITItalian actress
- Paola Pignib. 1945ITItalian athletics competitor (1945-2021)
- Princess Astrid, Archduchess of Austria-Esteb. 1962BEnot in their usual nameBelgian and Austria-Este Imperial and Royal
- Paola Cortellesib. 1973ITItalian actress and singer (born 1973)
- Paola Suárezb. 1976ARArgentine tennis player
- Francesca Albaneseb. 1977ITnot in their usual nameItalian lawyer and academic (born 1977), independent United Nations human rights expert
- Paola Núñezb. 1978MXMexican actress
- Danna Paolab. 1995MXMexican singer, actress, composer and model
- Paola Egonub. 1998ITItalian volleyball player (born 1998)
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 101 sources across 50 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 62K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 61K | #497 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 51K | #774 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 3.6K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 336 | #497 |
| IT Italy | ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend) | 2024 | 143 | #163 |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 109 | #34 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present) | 2024 | 99 | #758 |
| CL Chile | SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021) | 2021 | 23 | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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 Paola come from?
- Italian feminine of Paul; Lat. paulus 'small'. Recorded by Dictionnaire généalogique des prénoms.
- What does the name Paola mean?
- Recorded meaning: Italian feminine of Paul; Lat.
- Is Paola a male or female name?
- Paola is a female 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.
- In which country does Paola have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 177 thousand people named Paola in Italy, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled paola.
- What are other forms of the name Paola?
- In the etymology graph, Paula, Paulette and Paule are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How common is the name Paola?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 61,663 people named Paola in 2022, about 1 in 3.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Paola compared with other names?
- In Italy, Paola is the 785th most common given name of 102,667 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Paola?
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/paolaThe 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, “Paola” — the 785th most common given name in Italy. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.