Medeiros
surname · Latin script
Meaning: habitational name from any of various places named Medeiros, from Portuguese and Galician medeiro ‘place where shocks of maize are gathered’ (a derivative of meda ‘shock’, ‘stack’, Latin meta ‘(pyrami
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/medejɾus/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Medeiros is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country, where it is the 60th most common surname.
- BRBrazil1 in 322(measured from records)
- UYUruguay1 in 1.1K
- PTPortugal≈1 in 1.2K
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)
- #893 (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 348 (measured from records)
- 1 in 322 (inferred from the name graph)
657,549 people
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
habitational name from any of various places named Medeiros, from Portuguese and Galician medeiro ‘place where shocks of maize are gathered’ (a derivative of meda ‘shock’, ‘stack’, Latin meta ‘(pyramidshaped) post’).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Medeiros 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | #60 | 657,549 | 1 in 322 | 658K | Medeiros | 250 |
| SD Sudan | — | ≈30,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | — | Medeiros | 2 |
| US United States | — | 19,031 | 1 in 17K | 19K | Medeiros | 348 |
| PT Portugal | #100 | ≈8,900 est. | ≈1 in 1.2K | — | Medeiros | 136 |
| AO Angola | #124 | ≈8,200 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | — | Medeiros | 17 |
| UY Uruguay | #197 | 3,151 | 1 in 1.1K | 3.2K | Medeiros | 39 |
657,549 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); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; 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)
Medeiros is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Portuguese, ous places named with Port, medeiro place where shocks of maize are gathered (a deriv. of meda shock, stack, L meta (pyramid-shaped) post). Vars.: O’Meehan, Meegan, Meechan.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
wheat strings
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
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)
- Elli Medeirosb. 1956UYFrench-Uruguayan singer and actress
- Leonardo Medeirosb. 1964BRBrazilian actor
- Maria de Medeirosb. 1965PTPortuguese actress, film director and singer
- Inês de Medeirosb. 1968PTPortuguese actress and politician
- Glenn Medeirosb. 1970USAmerican former musician, singer, and songwriter (born 1970)
- Renato Medeirosb. 1982BRBrazilian footballer
- Suelyn Medeirosb. 1986USBrazilian-American model and actress
- Etiene Medeirosb. 1991BRBrazilian swimmer
- Isabella Schererb. 1996BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian actress
- Kodi Medeirosb. 1996USAmerican professional baseball pitcher
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 20 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 658K | #74 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 19K | #1,889 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 18K | #1,916 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 18K | #1,818 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 3.2K | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- What does the name Medeiros mean, and where does it come from?
- habitational name from any of various places named Medeiros, from Portuguese and Galician medeiro ‘place where shocks of maize are gathered’ (a derivative of meda ‘shock’, ‘stack’, Latin meta ‘(pyrami… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Medeiros?
- A machine transcription gives /medejɾus/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
- In which country does Medeiros have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 658 thousand people named Medeiros, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled medeiros.
- Where is Medeiros most common?
- Medeiros is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 322 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Medeiros?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 657,549 people named Medeiros, about 1 in 322 residents.
- How common is Medeiros compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Medeiros is the 60th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Medeiros?
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/medeirosThe 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, “Medeiros” — the 60th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.