Legato

surname · Latin script

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

Legato is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. In English, recorded as Smoothly, in a connected manner.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • ITItaly
  • ARArgentina

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.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from legato ‘legate’, ‘envoy of the Roman Catholic Church’, presumably either a nickname for one who gave himself the air of a papal legate, or an occupational name for someone in the service of a legate.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.

How Legato is read(measured from records)

Legato is one spelling over 4 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.

  • English66%

    Smoothly, in a connected manner.

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

  • Spanish14%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Legato in Spanish.

  • Italian5.5%

    from legato ‘legate’, ‘envoy of the Roman Catholic Church’, presumably either a nickname for one who gave himself the air of a papal legate, or an occupational name for someone in the service of a legate.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

    awkward, stiff

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

  • French5.4%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Legato in French.

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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)

Recorded in:

No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.

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)

Legato 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 Polish, legato (style of performance characterized by smoothly connected notes)

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

  • In Esperanto, singular present nominal passive participle of legi

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

  • In Latin, dative/ablative singular of lēgātus

    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)

1930194019501960Marianne Legato, b. 1935Philippe Legato, b. 1947Robert Legato, b. 1956Frank Legato, b. 1956

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 10 sources across 5 countries.

Official registers attesting Legato
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010370#55,505
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020364#59,889
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000346#55,481
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—63—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)196121—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)199113—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)197113—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)195113—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)19815—
IT Italy意大利语姓名译名手册 (Xinhua Italian Name Manual)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1941——

Reference works 2

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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 Legato come from?
from legato ‘legate’, ‘envoy of the Roman Catholic Church’, presumably either a nickname for one who gave himself the air of a papal legate, or an occupational name for someone in the service of a leg… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
What does the name Legato mean?
In English, Smoothly, in a connected manner.
In which country does Legato have the most bearers?
Legato is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Legato?

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Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/legato

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.

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, “Legato”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Legato parses inside a full name →