Spanish Names

Structure & order

A full Spanish name is one or more given names followed by two family names:

[GIVEN(S)] [SURNAME_paternal] [SURNAME_maternal]

• First surname = primer apellido / apellido paterno, traditionally the father's first surname.
• Second surname = segundo apellido / apellido materno, traditionally the mother's first surname.

Example: José García Torres → given José, paternal García, maternal Torres. Each parent passes only their own first surname down, so the second (maternal) surname is dropped at the next generation; the paternal line tends to dominate over time unless order is chosen otherwise.

Latin American practice mirrors Spain, with national variation: Argentina historically leans toward a single paternal surname; Uruguay makes two surnames mandatory; some countries (e.g. Ecuador) allow a household to invert the order consistently across all children.

Given names

Given names are most often Catholic/saint names and traditional Hispanic forms. Compound given names are very common and are treated as a single unit, not as first + middle name:

• José María (masculine) and María José (feminine), María / José honour the Virgin and St. Joseph respectively.
• The first element usually signals the bearer's sex, but the second need not: José María Aznar (male) carries María; María José (female) carries José.
• Compounds are often abbreviated in writing: José M.ª, M.ª José, José Ma.
• Diminutives/hypocorisms are heavily used in address but are not the registered name: Pepe (← José), Pepa, Lola (← Dolores), Paco (← Francisco), Charo (← Rosario).

Family names & patronymics

Inheritance: child = father's first surname + mother's first surname. With unknown/unrecognised paternity, the child may bear both of the mother's surnames.

The particle de ("of"):

• Connects a surname to a place or to a toponymic/patronymic element: Fernández de Córdoba, de la Rúa, del Hierro.
• Historically associated with nobility (16th–17th c.) but also simply meant "from" in regions such as Álava, Navarre and eastern Castile, so it is not a reliable nobility marker.
• Capitalisation: lowercase with a forename present (Gonzalo de la Torre), capitalised when the forename is dropped (De la Torre). A de + del/de la cluster is part of the surname and travels with it.

The conjunction y / e ("and"):

• Placed between the two surnames to mark that the first is a surname, not a forename: Santiago Ramón y Cajal (so "Ramón" is not read as a given name).
• Becomes e for euphony before a maternal surname starting with I-, Y-, Hi-: Eduardo Dato e Iradier.
• Sanctioned by the Civil Registry Law of 1870; now read more as a written/formal convention than spoken in everyday Castilian.

Married women: women generally do not change their surnames at marriage. Optionally (and now largely archaic/high-society), a wife may be referred to informally as [her surname] de [husband's surname], Leocadia Blanco de Pérez, or as a widow vda. de (viuda de). This form has no legal value. In much of Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba) it is uncommon, considered antiquated, or even derogatory.

Legal reforms on surname order:

• Ley 40/1999 (Spain): parents may choose which surname goes first, fixed at the registration of the first child and applied to all siblings; the traditional paternal-first order is still chosen ~99.5% of the time.
• 2017 / in force 30 June 2018 (Spain): the automatic "father's surname first" default was removed; parents must explicitly agree the order; alphabetical precedence breaks parental disputes.
• Latin America: Uruguay (2013), Colombia (2021) and a 2025 Mexican Supreme Court ruling similarly let parents reverse the order by mutual consent.

How to address someone

• Don / Doña + given name: deferential/formal, don José, doña María.
• Señor / Señora / Señorita + first (paternal) surname: Señor García, Señora Torres, never the maternal surname alone.
• Professional titles: Doctor(a), Licenciado/a (Lic.), Ingeniero/a (Ing.), common in Latin America.
• The first surname is the default short form and the alphabetisation key (Federico García Lorca files under G, "García Lorca"). When the paternal surname is very common (García, López, Rodríguez), people frequently go by the distinctive maternal surname instead, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero → "Zapatero"; Federico García Lorca → "Lorca".

Pitfalls for software

• Two surnames, not first + last. The "last" token (maternal surname) is not the family's primary surname; parsers that take the final word as the surname will mis-key Hispanic names. The first surname is primary for sorting and address. See Surname Formation.
• Compound given names look like first + middle but are one unit. Splitting José María / María José into given + middle is wrong, and the second element does not reliably indicate sex. See Gender Marking.
• de, del, de la, y/e are intra-surname connectors, not separate tokens or middle initials; keep them attached to their surname; y/e sits between the two surnames.
• No middle name in the English sense: extra given-name tokens are part of a compound given name, not a middle name.
• Married names with de are optional, informal, legally void, and rare/disfavoured in much of Latin America; do not assume a marital surname change.
• Surname order is no longer guaranteed paternal-first for people registered under post-1999 Spanish law or recent Latin American reforms, though paternal-first remains overwhelmingly dominant.
• Closely related to Portuguese Names (multiple-surname Iberian system, but Portuguese traditionally orders mother-then-father and allows up to four surnames).