Rui
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Rui is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Portugal it is the 11th most common given name. Recorded meaning: do latim arrugia; indica morador junto a arroio, rio ou córrego.
- PTPortugal≈1 in 99(inferred from the name graph)
- AOAngola≈1 in 1.2K
- CNChina≈1 in 2K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 273 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 99 (inferred from the name graph)
≈710,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Portugal, 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)
do latim arrugia; indica morador junto a arroio, rio ou córrego
Sources 1
- Dicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Rui 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈710,000 est. | ≈1 in 2K | — | Rui | 153 |
| PT Portugal | #11 | ≈100,000 est. | ≈1 in 99 | listed | Rui | 230 |
| BR Brazil | #696 | 29,481 | 1 in 7.2K | 38K | Rui | 168 |
| AO Angola | #30 | ≈26,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.2K | 2 | Rui | 60 |
| US United States | — | 7,036 | 1 in 47K | 4.1K | Rui | 273 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈4,600 est. | ≈1 in 7.1K | — | Rui | 44 |
| CH Switzerland | #424 | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 3.5K | 68 | Rui | 73 |
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: the pt-irn-lista-nomes register; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)
Rui 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.
Afectuosa, cariñosa
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In pmf, thorn, spike; kind of rattan (_nanga_) with sharp thorns, the leaves of which are used as roof thatch
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
In Latin, first-person singular perfect active indicative of ruō
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
ISO 639-3 language code for Rufiji.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In sdc, masculine/feminine singular of rùiu
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.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Rui Duarte de Barrosb. 1960GWGuinea-Bissauan prime minister
- Rui Maria de Araújob. 1964TLPrime minister of East Timor
- Rui da Silvab. 1968PTPortuguese DJ
- Rui Vitóriab. 1970PTPortuguese footballer and manager
- Rui Costab. 1972PTPortuguese footballer (born 1972)
- Rui Jorgeb. 1973PTPortuguese footballer
- Rui Patríciob. 1988PTPortuguese association football player
- Mário Ruib. 1991PTPortuguese association football player
- Rui Silvab. 1994PTPortuguese footballer (born 1994)
- Rui Hachimurab. 1998JPJapanese basketball 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 83 sources across 39 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 38K | #926 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 29K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 29K | #834 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 4.1K | #3,120 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 3K | #3,120 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 378 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 120 | #834 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 49 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 10 | — |
| PT Portugal | IRN — Lista de Nomes Próprios admitidos | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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
- Is Rui a male or female name?
- Rui 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 Rui mean?
- Recorded meaning: do latim arrugia; indica morador junto a arroio, rio ou córrego
- What are other forms of the name Rui?
- In the etymology graph, Roderick, Rod and Ruy are forms of the same name in other languages; it is recorded as a short form of Rodrigo.
- In which country does Rui have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 713 thousand people named Rui in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled rui.
- How common is the name Rui?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 29,481 people named Rui in 2022, about 1 in 7.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Rui compared with other names?
- In Portugal, Rui is the 11th most common given name of 19,352 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Rui?
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/ruiThe 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, “Rui” — the 11th most common given name in Portugal. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.