Leva
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: draft (of troops) (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 25 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/ˈle.β̞a/(recorded in a dictionary) Spanish · from Wiktionary
Leva is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Italy than in any other country.
- SISlovenia1 in 10K(measured from records)
- ITItaly≈1 in 11Kfew records
- CZCzechia1 in 13K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Italy (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 111 (measured from records)
- 1 in 10.0K (inferred from the name graph)
≈5,200 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Slovenia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Leva
- Spanish:/ˈle.β̞a/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
- Italian:/ˈlɛ.va/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)of uncertain origin; possibly from the Italian exclamation leva! ‘lift!’, used as a metonymic nickname for a sailor.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.
How Leva is read
(measured from records)Leva 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.
- Spanish42%
draft (of troops)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English26%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Leva in English.
- French5.9%
third-person singular past historic of lever
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Italian5.7%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Leva in Italian.
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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 the surname Leva is found
(measured from records)Leva 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.
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: INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; MVČR — living population register 2017; stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); the xinhua-italian-manual register; e-services.md — living population register. 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)Leva is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
of uncertain origin; possibly from the Italian exclamation leva! ‘lift!’, used as a metonymic nickname for a sailor.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from Old Occitan leva ‘import levy’, hence a metonymic occupational name for a collector of such duties.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Leal, de confianza
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
variant of Levee.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)- William Hesketh Leverb. 1851GBnot in their usual nameEnglish industrialist, philanthropist, and politician (1851-1925)
- Johnny Leverb. 1957INnot in their usual nameIndian actor
- Fat Leverb. 1960USnot in their usual nameAmerican basketball player (born 1960)
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)39 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 25 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Leva come from?
- of uncertain origin; possibly from the Italian exclamation leva! ‘lift!’, used as a metonymic nickname for a sailor. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Leva?
- It depends on the language: in Spanish /ˈle.β̞a/ (Wiktionary); in Italian /ˈlɛ.va/ (Wiktionary).
- What does the name Leva mean?
- In Spanish, draft (of troops)
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Leva?
- Mondonomo estimates about 5.2 thousand people named Leva in Italy, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled leva. After it come Peru, United States, Czechia and Spain; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Leva most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Leva is densest in Slovenia — about 1 in 10.0 thousand people — even though Italy holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Leva?
- In the United States, the national register counted 956 people named Leva in 2010, about 1 in 348 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Leva?
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/levaThe 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, “Leva”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.