Bessa
surname · Latin script
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 17 countries · latest register: Ministere de l'Interieur, 2025
/bɛsɐ/(machine-generated) Portuguese · model-generated
Bessa is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country: 43,790 people, counted by IBGE. Bessa is also written Бесса in Cyrillic.
- PTPortugal≈1 in 1.5K(inferred from the name graph)
- AOAngola≈1 in 4.5Kfew records
- BRBrazil1 in 4.8K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 150 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.5K (inferred from the name graph)
43,790 people
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Portugal, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Bessa in other scripts: Cyrillic
(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.
How to pronounce Bessa
- Portuguese:/bɛsɐ/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Cited for this meaning 1
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Bessa is found
(measured from records)Bessa 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 | #301 | 43,790 | 1 in 4.8K | 44K | Bessa | 150 |
| AO Angola | #306 | ≈8,400 est. | ≈1 in 4.5K | — | Bessa | 19 |
| PT Portugal | #184 | ≈7,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | — | Bessa | 97 |
| FR France | — | ≈910 est. | ≈1 in 75K | 84 | Bessa | 4 |
| US United States | — | 253 | 1 in 1.3M | 266 | Bessa | 122 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 111 | 1 in 31K | 111 | Bessa | 7 |
| GA Gabon | — | ≈73 est. | ≈1 in 35K | 1 | — | — |
43,790 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); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); Ministere de l'Interieur — 2025 candidate lists (local + legislative). 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)Bessa is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In bar, superlative degree of guad: better
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, A former copper coin of Ethiopia.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Italian, feminine singular of besso
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Polish, slump, bear market
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)- Pancrace Bessab. 1772FRFrench painter, watercolourist, illustrator (1772 - 1846)
- Agustina Bessa-Luísb. 1922PTPortuguese writer (1922–2019)
- Daniel Bessab. 1993BRBrazilian footballer
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).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)28 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 17 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you pronounce Bessa?
- In Portuguese /bɛsɐ/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Bessa?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 44 thousand people named Bessa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bessa. After it come Angola, Portugal, France and United States; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Bessa?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 43,790 people named Bessa, about 1 in 4.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Bessa compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Bessa is the 301st most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bessa?
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/bessaThe 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, “Bessa” — ranked 477th in Brazil (IBGE). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.