Canal

loc · Latin script

Meaning: An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Canal is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Mexico.

rarermore common
  • BOBolivia
  • ARArgentina
  • ITItaly

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Mexico (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
155 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation.

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Canal counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Canal is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
MX Mexico—8Canal73
AR Argentina—1.1KCanal59
ES Spain—3.8KCanal126
IT Italy—listedCanal63
BO Bolivia——Canal4
BR Brazil—4.1K—1
US United States—1.2K—155
FR France—263—2

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); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); RENAPO — name frequencies (eduardofv dataset); the xinhua-italian-manual 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Canal is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Philippines

    Languages: English, German

    Also written Cañal

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Canäl, Cañal

  • Hindi name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Pakistan

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu

    Also written Cañal

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Cañal

  • Arabic name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Morocco

    Also written Cañal, Cànal

54 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Canal 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 Italian, forma reduzida ou apocopada de Canale

    as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos

  • In Kurdish, Crimson soul

    as a wordkurdi.sh Kurdish personal names dictionary

  • In Portuguese, channel

    as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese

  • In Galician, fish-weir; place or installation for fishing, on a river

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Catalan, canal (artificial passage for water)

    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)

12001400160018002000Martino Canal, b. 1300Bernardo Canal, b. 1664Canaletto, b. 1697Marguerite Canal, b. 1890Esteban Canal, b. 1896Antonio Canal, b. 1936Jamil Canal, b. 1946Richard Canal, b. 1953David Canal, b. 1978

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 30 sources across 19 countries.

Official registers attesting Canal
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—4.1K#2,642
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—3.8K#1,350
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—3.8K#1,350
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.2K#22,840
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020101.1K#22,618
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—1.1K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020001K#23,514
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1961425—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1951415—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1971371—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1921367—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1941334—

Reference works 6

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

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 Canal mean, and where does it come from?
An artificial waterway or artificially improved river used for travel, shipping, or irrigation. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
In which country does Canal have the most bearers?
Canal is most frequently recorded in Mexico, where it is most often spelled canal.

What do you want to know about Canal?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/canal

The 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, “Canal”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Canal parses inside a full name →