Freire
surname · Latin script
Meaning: A surname from Spanish [in turn from Galician]
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/fɾejɾi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Freire is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- ECEcuador1 in 564(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 722
- PTPortugal≈1 in 1.7K
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.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- Sources
- 261 (measured from records)
- 1 in 564 (inferred from the name graph)
293,042 people
Highest-authority source
Ecuador
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
A surname from Spanish [in turn from Galician].
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Freire 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.
293,042 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); INEC — civil registry names; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)
Freire 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 Portuguese, friar
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)
- Ramón Freireb. 1787CLChilean politician (1787-1851)
- Rómulo Gallegosb. 1884VEnot in their usual nameVenezuelan politician and writer (1884–1969)
- Paulo Freireb. 1921BRBrazilian educator and philosopher (1921–1997)
- José Freire Falcãob. 1925BRRoman Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of Brasília (1925–2021)
- Nelson Freireb. 1944BRBrazilian pianist (1944–2021)
- Daniel Freireb. 1961ARArgentine actor
- Óscar Freireb. 1976ESSpanish cyclist
- Cecilia Freireb. 1981ESSpanish actress
- Christian Santosb. 1988VEnot in their usual nameVenezuelan footballer
- Borja García Freireb. 1990ESSpanish 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)
Attested in 29 sources across 17 countries.
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Freire mean, and where does it come from?
- A surname from Spanish [in turn from Galician]. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Freire?
- A machine transcription gives /fɾejɾi/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
- In which country does Freire have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 293 thousand people named Freire, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled freire.
- Where is Freire most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Freire is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 564 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Freire?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 293,042 people named Freire, about 1 in 722 residents.
- How common is Freire compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Freire is the 139th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Freire?
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/freireThe 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, “Freire” — the 139th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.