Nakamura
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Japanese: variously written, usually with characters meaning ‘village in the middle’. One of the ten most common surnames, it is very ancient and also a very conunon place name. Listed in the Shinsen shojiroku
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Nakamura is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- BRBrazil1 in 25K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 43K
- ARArgentina1 in 242K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- Sources
- 188 (measured from records)
- 1 in 25K (inferred from the name graph)
8,618 people
Highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
variously written, usually with characters meaning ‘village in the middle’. One of the ten most common surnames, it is very ancient and also a very conunon place name. Listed in the Shinsen shojiroku.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Nakamura is read(measured from records)
Nakamura is one spelling over 3 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.
- Japanese55%
variously written, usually with characters meaning ‘village in the middle’. One of the ten most common surnames, it is very ancient and also a very conunon place name. Listed in the Shinsen shojiroku.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
- English27%
Japanese: ‘village in the middle’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- Portuguese10%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Nakamura in Portuguese.
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Nakamura 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 | #663 | 8,618 | 1 in 25K | 8.6K | Nakamura | 130 |
| US United States | — | 7,658 | 1 in 43K | 7.8K | Nakamura | 188 |
| AR Argentina | — | 188 | 1 in 242K | 188 | Nakamura | 44 |
| FI Finland | — | 105 | 1 in 53K | 105 | — | 1 |
| ES Spain | — | 95 | 1 in 526K | 95 | Nakamura | 18 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 61 | 1 in 138K | 61 | — | 6 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 19 | 1 in 178K | 19 | — | 5 |
8,618 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Kuniwo Nakamurab. 1943PWPalauan politician (1943-2020)
- Shuji Nakamurab. 1954JPJapanese doctor of Engineering (1954-), inventor of the blue LED, 2014 Nobel laureate in Physics
- Suzy Nakamurab. 1968USAmerican actress
- Nakamura Shidō IIb. 1972JPJapanese actor
- Shunsuke Nakamurab. 1978JPJapanese association football player
- Kengo Nakamurab. 1980JPJapanese association football player
- Tomoya Nakamurab. 1986JPJapanese actor
- Hikaru Nakamurab. 1987USAmerican chess player
- Anne Nakamurab. 1987JPJapanese actress
- Aya Nakamurab. 1995MLMalian-French singer (born 1995)
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 31 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 8.6K | #1,475 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 7.8K | #4,203 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.7K | #4,633 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 7.4K | #4,635 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 188 | — |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 105 | #12,308 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 95 | #28,592 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 95 | #28,449 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 61 | #16,013 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 19 | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Nakamura mean, and where does it come from?
- variously written, usually with characters meaning ‘village in the middle’. One of the ten most common surnames, it is very ancient and also a very conunon place name. Listed in the Shinsen shojiroku. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Nakamura have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 8.6 thousand people named Nakamura, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nakamura.
- Where is Nakamura most common?
- Nakamura is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 25 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Nakamura?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 8,618 people named Nakamura, about 1 in 25 thousand residents.
- How common is Nakamura compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Nakamura is the 663rd most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nakamura?
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/nakamuraThe 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, “Nakamura” — the 663rd most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.