Bretón
surname · Latin script
Bretón is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Main GB Location (1881): Guernsey; London. ethnic name for a Breton, from Old French Breton, the oblique case form of Old French Bret; compare Brittain .
- ESSpain1 in 35K(measured from records)
- CHSwitzerland1 in 62K
- USUnited States1 in 77K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 299 (measured from records)
- 1 in 35K (inferred from the name graph)
4,322 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Spain
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Breton in US United States, ES Spain, BE Belgium and 1 more.
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)Main GB Location (1881): Guernsey; London. ethnic name for a Breton, from Old French Breton, the oblique case form of Old French Bret; compare Brittain . For the variation between Breton, Briton, and Bruton, compare Brett .
Cited for this meaning 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)
- Dictionnaire des noms de famille du Canada français. Anthroponymie et généalogie. 2e édition
Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bretón 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 4,322 | 1 in 77K | 4.3K | Breton | 299 |
| ES Spain | 1,445 | 1 in 35K | 1.4K | Breton | 45 |
| MX Mexico | ≈260 est. | ≈1 in 499K | 79 | Bretón | 40 |
| AR Argentina | 229 | 1 in 199K | 229 | Bretón | 8 |
| BE Belgium | 145 | 1 in 81K | 145 | Breton | 16 |
| CH Switzerland | 136 | 1 in 62K | 136 | Breton | 13 |
| DO Dominican Republic | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 101K | — | Bretón | 10 |
4,322 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPO — name frequencies (eduardofv dataset); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); 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)Bretón is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Asturian, Breton (of or pertaining to Brittany)
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)- Manuel Bretón de los Herrerosb. 1796ESSpanish dramatist, poet, and journalist (1796–1873)
- Tomás Bretónb. 1850ESSpanish conductor and composer (1850-1923)
- Santiago Bretónb. 1940ESSpanish Jesuit theologian (1928-2014)
- Aurora Bretónb. 1950MXMexican archer
- Fernando Alejandro Larrazábal Bretónb. 1962MXMexican politician
- Alberto Bretón Rodríguezb. 1964ESSpanish politician
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)1 register or reference work attests this spelling, across 0 countries.
Reference works 1
- 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
- What does the name Bretón mean, and where does it come from?
- Main GB Location (1881): Guernsey; London. ethnic name for a Breton, from Old French Breton, the oblique case form of Old French Bret; compare Brittain . Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages) and 1 other source.
- In which country does Bretón have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 4.3 thousand people named Bretón, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled breton.
- Where is Bretón most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Bretón is densest in Spain — about 1 in 35 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Bretón?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,322 people named Bretón in 2010, about 1 in 77 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bretón?
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/bret%C3%B3nThe 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, “Bretón”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.