Lopez

surname · Latin script

Meaning: ‘Son of Lope’, a medieval Spanish personal name perhaps ultimately from Latin lupus ‘wolf’

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

Lopez is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 15th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • NINicaragua≈1 in 28(inferred from the name graph)
  • UYUruguay1 in 37
  • HNHonduras≈1 in 42

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.

United States (measured from records)

874,523 people, 2010

#25 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

5 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
587 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 28 (inferred from the name graph)

Nicaragua, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

LopezLatin(measured from records)
ЛопесCyrillic(measured from records)
โลเปซThai(measured from records)
ΛοπεζGreek(measured from records)
로페즈Hangul(measured from records)

Locally spelled López in UY Uruguay, GT Guatemala.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

‘Son of Lope’, a medieval Spanish personal name perhaps ultimately from Latin lupus ‘wolf’.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Lopez 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.

Where Lopez is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#15874,5231 in 380879KLopez587
ES Spain#2871,3801 in 57871KLopez332
CO Colombia#3≈560,000 est.≈1 in 886.2KLopez246
AR Argentina#4520,8971 in 87521KLopez206
GT Guatemala#16≈390,000 est.≈1 in 44—López134
NI Nicaragua#1≈220,000 est.≈1 in 28801Lopez106
HN Honduras#2≈220,000 est.≈1 in 42—Lopez115
SV El Salvador#3≈140,000 est.≈1 in 47—Lopez129
UY Uruguay#17292,3261 in 3792KLópez129

874,523 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics); This page contains a database of popular Nicaraguan names and surnames categorized by gender and frequency, published by; 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Lopez is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French surname18 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Spain, Philippines

    Languages: French, Catalan

    Also written López, Lòpez, Lopéz, Lopèz, Lõpez

  • a separate name15 spellings in the group

    Also written Lõpez, Lo-Pez, Lópéz, Loṕez, Lòpez

  • Turkish surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Spain, Türkiye, Peru

    Languages: Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani

    Also written López, Lopéz

  • Croatian surname56 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Spain, United States, Peru, Philippines

    Languages: Croatian, Bulgarian, Serbian

    Also written López, Lopes, Лопез, Лопес, Lòpez

95 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Lopez 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.

  • patronymic from the medieval personal name Lope (from Latin lupus ‘wolf’). This is one of the commonest of all Spanish surnames.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Italian, variante gráfica de Lopes.

    as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos

  • In Cebuano, a common surname from Spanish, common across Visayas and Mindanao.

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

  • In roa-opt, a surname originating as a patronymic

    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)

14001600180020002200Ruy López de Segura, b. 1530Juan Negrín, b. 1892Adolfo López Mateos, b. 1910José María Aznar, b. 1953Lopez Obrador, b. 1953Jennifer Lopez, b. 1969Robert Lopez, b. 1975Carlos Marchena, b. 1979Seth Rollins, b. 1986Fermín López, b. 2003

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 73 sources across 42 countries.

Official registers attesting Lopez
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020879K#12
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010875K#12
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—871K#5
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—871K#5
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000622K#21
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—521K—
UY UruguayINE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public)—92K—
CO ColombiaColombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co)—284#6

Reference works 8

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 Lopez mean, and where does it come from?
‘Son of Lope’, a medieval Spanish personal name perhaps ultimately from Latin lupus ‘wolf’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Lopez have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 875 thousand people named Lopez, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lopez.
How common is the name Lopez?
In the United States, the national register counted 874,523 people named Lopez in 2010, about 1 in 380 residents.
How common is Lopez compared with other names?
In the United States, Lopez is the 15th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Lopez?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/lopez

The 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, “Lopez” — the 15th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Lopez parses inside a full name →