Costa
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Portuguese: coast, back (anatomy)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Costa is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Portugal than in any other country, where it is the 5th most common surname.
- PTPortugal≈1 in 80(inferred from the name graph)
- UYUruguay1 in 179
- AOAngola≈1 in 367
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.
- Portugal (inferred from the name graph)
- #157 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 433 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 80 (inferred from the name graph)
≈130,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Portugal, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
(i) 'person who lives on a slope or riverbank or by the coast', or 'person from Costa'; (ii) a different form of Costas.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Costa is read(measured from records)
Costa is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Portuguese84%
coast, back (anatomy)
as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese
coast (shoreline)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English5.3%
(i) 'person who lives on a slope or riverbank or by the coast', or 'person from Costa'; (ii) a different form of Costas.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Costa 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PT Portugal | #5 | ≈130,000 est. | ≈1 in 80 | — | Costa | 238 |
| AO Angola | #4 | ≈89,000 est. | ≈1 in 367 | — | Costa | 79 |
| FR France | — | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 1.7K | Costa | 7 |
| US United States | — | 38,265 | 1 in 8.7K | 38K | Costa | 433 |
| IT Italy | #38 | ≈34,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.9K | 1 | Costa | 180 |
| ES Spain | #117 | 27,815 | 1 in 1.8K | 28K | Costa | 184 |
| UY Uruguay | #23 | 18,928 | 1 in 179 | 19K | Costa | 100 |
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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000). 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)
Costa is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Italian, do lat. costa, encosta; pode indicar morador de encosta ou oriundo de localidades chamadas Costa
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In French, a Languedoc surname, Costa, from Occitan, equivalent to the French Côté
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In lld, third-person singular present indicative of coster
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)
- Costa-Gavrasb. 1933GRGreek-French film director (born 1933)
- Elis Reginab. 1945BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian singer of popular and jazz music (1945–1982)
- Fernando Santosb. 1954PTnot in their usual namePortuguese football manager
- António Costab. 1961PTPortuguese politician, President of the European Council since 2024 (1961-)
- Jorge Costab. 1971PTPortuguese footballer and manager (1971–2025)
- Rui Costab. 1972PTPortuguese footballer (born 1972)
- Ricardo Costab. 1981PTPortuguese footballer
- Danteb. 1983BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian association football player
- Diego Costab. 1988BRBrazilian association football player
- Douglas Costab. 1990BRBrazilian association football player
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 71 sources across 38 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 38K | #890 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 38K | #904 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 35K | #900 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 28K | #183 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 28K | #183 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 19K | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 1.7K | — |
Reference works 6
- 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)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
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
- Where does the name Costa come from?
- (i) 'person who lives on a slope or riverbank or by the coast', or 'person from Costa'; (ii) a different form of Costas. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What does the name Costa mean?
- In Portuguese, coast, back (anatomy)
- What are other forms of the name Costa?
- In the etymology graph, Costilla, Coste and Кость are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Costa have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 129 thousand people named Costa in Portugal, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled costa.
- How common is the name Costa?
- In the United States, the national register counted 38,265 people named Costa in 2010, about 1 in 8.7 thousand residents.
- How common is Costa compared with other names?
- In Portugal, Costa is the 5th most common surname of 45,564 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Costa?
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/costaThe 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, “Costa” — the 5th most common surname in Portugal. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.