Guardia
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: custodian, warden (male)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɡwardja/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Guardia is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Argentina than in any other country.
- BOBolivia≈1 in 2.8K(inferred from the name graph)
- ARArgentina1 in 4.3K
- PAPanama≈1 in 5.1K
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.
- Argentina (measured from records)
- Sources
- 223 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.8K (inferred from the name graph)
10,606 people
Highest-authority source
Bolivia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from Catalan guardia, Spanish and Italian guardia ‘guard’, ‘watch’, a topographic name for someone who lived by a watch place, an occupational name for a member of the town guard, or a habitational name from any of the numerous places named (La) Guardia.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 14 languages in the etymology graph.
How Guardia is read(measured from records)
Guardia 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.
- Spanish84%
custodian, warden (male)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English6.0%
A surname from the Romance languages.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Guardia 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AR Argentina | #495 | 10,606 | 1 in 4.3K | 11K | Guardia | 76 |
| ES Spain | #752 | 4,784 | 1 in 10K | 4.8K | Guardia | 133 |
| PE Peru | #859 | ≈4,400 est. | ≈1 in 7.3K | — | Guardia | 61 |
| BO Bolivia | #162 | ≈4,200 est. | ≈1 in 2.8K | — | Guardia | 47 |
| VE Venezuela | — | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 15K | — | Guardia | 39 |
| PA Panama | #104 | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 5.1K | 12 | Guardia | 74 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 446 | 1 in 7.6K | 446 | — | 23 |
10,606 people counted by RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national). 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); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Tribunal Electoral — Boletín, postulaciones for the 5 May 2024 general election; 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)
Guardia 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.
from Catalan guardia, Spanish and Italian guardia ‘guard’, ‘watch’, a topographic name for someone who lived by a watch place, an occupational name for a member of the town guard, or a habitational name from any of the numerous places named (La) Guardia.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Italian, do germ. wardian; o sobrenome indica vigia/sentinela ou procedência de localidades chamadas Guardia.
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In Italian, guard (all senses)
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)
- Francisco Ferrerb. 1859ESnot in their usual nameSpanish freethinker, anarchist and educator (1859–1909)
- Ricardo Adolfo de la Guardia Arangob. 1899PAPresident of Panama (1899-1969)
- Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardiab. 1900CRPresident of Costa Risueña from 1940 to 1944
- Francisco Calderón Guardiab. 1906CRCosta Rican politician (1906-1977)
- Roberto Berdeciob. 1910BOnot in their usual nameBolivian artist (1910-1996)
- Carlos Verab. 1928CLnot in their usual nameChilean long jumper, triple jumper and decathlete
- Jaime Guardiab. 1933PEPeruvian musician
- Gloria Guardiab. 1940PAPanamanian writer (1940–2019)
- Edgar Quinterosb. 1940BOnot in their usual nameBolivian association football player (1940–2023)
- Salvador Guardiab. 1974ESSpanish basketball player (born 1974)
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 27 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 11K | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 4.8K | #1,100 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 4.8K | #1,100 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 446 | — |
| PA Panama | Tribunal Electoral — Boletín, postulaciones for the 5 May 2024 general election | 2024 | 12 | #258 |
| PA Panama | Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names | — | 4 | #59 |
Reference works 7
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Guardia come from?
- from Catalan guardia, Spanish and Italian guardia ‘guard’, ‘watch’, a topographic name for someone who lived by a watch place, an occupational name for a member of the town guard, or a habitational na… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What are other forms of the name Guardia?
- In the etymology graph, Garde is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Guardia?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡwardja/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- What does the name Guardia mean?
- In Spanish, custodian, warden (male)
- In which country does Guardia have the most bearers?
- In Argentina, the national register counted about 11 thousand people named Guardia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled guardia.
- How common is the name Guardia?
- In Argentina, the national register counted 10,606 people named Guardia, about 1 in 4.3 thousand residents.
- How common is Guardia compared with other names?
- In Argentina, Guardia is the 495th most common surname of 398,256 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Guardia?
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/guardiaThe 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, “Guardia” — the 495th most common surname in Argentina. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.