Fontanella
surname · Latin script
Meaning: fontanelle, fontanel
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Fontanella is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Italy than in any other country.
- ARArgentina1 in 70K(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 149K
- ITItaly≈1 in 26K
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.
- Italy (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 77 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 26K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,400 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Italy, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
fontanelle, fontanel
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Fontanella 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Italy | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 26K | listed | Fontanella | 27 |
| BR Brazil | 1,422 | 1 in 149K | 1.4K | Fontanella | 77 |
| AR Argentina | 654 | 1 in 70K | 654 | Fontanella | 36 |
| US United States | 512 | 1 in 650K | 512 | Fontanella | 38 |
| ES Spain | 178 | 1 in 281K | 178 | Fontanella | 33 |
| CH Switzerland | 71 | 1 in 118K | 71 | — | 1 |
| PS Palestine | ≈20 est. | ≈1 in 241K | — | Fontanella | 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: RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); the xinhua-italian-manual 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)
Fontanella is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Italian, de Fontana + suf. fem. sing. -ella
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In Latvian, Avotiņš, maziem bērniem sprauga starp galvas kausa kauliem, kura pārvilkta tikai saišķaudiem
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Joan Pere Fontanellab. 1575ESCatalan judge
- Francesc Fontanellab. 1622ESCatalan poet and priest
- Marie des Angesb. 1661ITnot in their usual nameItalian religious
- Emilio Fontanellab. 1881ITItalian rower
- Alfred Fontanellab. 1923USAmerican lawyer
- Luigi Fontanellab. 1943ITItalian poet
- Vittorio Fontanellab. 1953ITItalian distance runner
- Elena Fontanellab. 1964ITItalian journalist
- Francesca Fontanellab. 1965ITItalian historian of antiquity (born 1965)
- Mario Fontanellab. 1989ITItalian 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 19 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 1.4K | #6,673 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 654 | — |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 512 | #42,378 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 508 | #40,552 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 471 | #48,441 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 178 | #18,078 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 178 | #18,011 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 71 | #14,356 |
| IT Italy | 意大利语姓名译名手册 (Xinhua Italian Name Manual) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- 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
- What does the name Fontanella mean, and where does it come from?
- fontanelle, fontanel Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Fontanella have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.4 thousand people named Fontanella in Italy, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled fontanella.
- How common is the name Fontanella?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 1,422 people named Fontanella, about 1 in 149 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Fontanella?
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/fontanellaThe 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, “Fontanella”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.