Pilar
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Pilar is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Spain than in any other country, where it is the 31st most common given name. Recorded meaning: Marian name honouring Nuestra Senora del Pilar ‘Our Lady of the Pillar’, referring to an alleged appearance of the Virgin standing on a pillar to St James the Greater at Saragossa.
- ESSpain1 in 406(measured from records)
- CLChile≈1 in 905
- PEPeru≈1 in 1.4K
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.
- Spain (measured from records)
- #675 (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 370 (measured from records)
- 1 in 406 (inferred from the name graph)
123,094 people
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Spain
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)
Marian name honouring Nuestra Senora del Pilar ‘Our Lady of the Pillar’, referring to an alleged appearance of the Virgin standing on a pillar to St James the Greater at Saragossa.
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Pilar 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | #31 | 123,094 | 1 in 406 | 134K | Pilar | 234 |
| PH Philippines | #764 | ≈27,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.1K | — | Pilar | 86 |
| CO Colombia | #222 | ≈24,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | 9 | Pilar | 164 |
| PE Peru | #35 | ≈22,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.4K | — | Pilar | 116 |
| CL Chile | #32 | ≈20,000 est. | ≈1 in 905 | 36 | Pilar | 130 |
| AR Argentina | #264 | ≈19,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.4K | 2.6K | Pilar | 129 |
123,094 people counted by INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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: INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021); RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present); the co-datosgov-candidates 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)
Pilar 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 Spanish, pillar, pier, mainstay
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Spanish, Del latín pila ‘pila, pilastra, pilar’; advocación aragonesa de la Virgen del Pilar.
as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios
In English, Spanish; 'supportive pillar'
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In German, weibl. Vom. spanischer Herkunft (span. päar »Pfeiler«). Der Name geht zurück auf die »Virgen del Pilar« (»die [heilige] Jungfrau von dem Pfeiler«), ein Muttergottesbild auf einem Pfeiler, das in Zaragoza (Spanien) verehrt wird (Fest am 12. Oktober). Die bildliche Darstellung bezieht sich auf eine
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Spanish: name referring to a title of the Virgin Mary, Nuestra Señora del Pilar ‘Our Lady of the Pillar’. The story is that in AD 40 the Virgin appeared, standing on a pillar, to St James the Greater at Saragossa. The vocabulary word pilar is masculine, but this has not inhibited its use as a feminine given name. Pet forms: Pili (most commonly found in the combination Maripili); Pilita, Piluca .
as a word
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)
- María Teresa de Silva, 13th Duchess of Albab. 1762ESnot in their usual nameSpanish aristocrat (1762-1802)
- Pilar Lorengarb. 1928ESSpanish operatic soprano
- Pilar Mercedes Miró Romerob. 1940ESFilm director, Screenwriter (1940-1997)
- Pilar Raholab. 1958ESSpanish politician
- Maria Canals Barrerab. 1966USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress
- Pilar Castrob. 1970ESSpanish actress
- Pilar Padillab. 1970MXactor
- Pilar Rubiob. 1978ESSpanish reporter and TV presenter
- Pili Peñab. 1986ESnot in their usual nameSpanish water polo player
- Pilar Fogliatib. 1992ITItalian actress
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 82 sources across 36 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 134K | #29 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 123K | #68 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present) | 2024 | 2.6K | #49 |
| AR Argentina | datos.gob.ar — nombres.datos.gob.ar per-name lookup (1922–2015) | 2015 | 1.1K | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — births 1922–2015 (Kaggle mirror) | 2015 | 1.1K | — |
| CL Chile | SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021) | 2021 | 36 | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 27 | #21,367 |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 9 | #112 |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 does the name Pilar mean, and where does it come from?
- Marian name honouring Nuestra Senora del Pilar ‘Our Lady of the Pillar’, referring to an alleged appearance of the Virgin standing on a pillar to St James the Greater at Saragossa. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- Is Pilar a male or female name?
- Pilar 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.
- What are other forms of the name Pilar?
- In the etymology graph, Pili is a recorded short or pet form.
- In which country does Pilar have the most bearers?
- In Spain, the national register counted about 123 thousand people named Pilar, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled pilar.
- Where is Pilar most common?
- Pilar is densest in Spain, where the national register counts about 1 in 406 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Pilar?
- In Spain, the national register counted 123,094 people named Pilar, about 1 in 406 residents.
- How common is Pilar compared with other names?
- In Spain, Pilar is the 31st most common given name of 135,644 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Pilar?
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/pilarThe 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, “Pilar” — the 31st most common given name in Spain. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.