Pacaya
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Costa Rican bamboo palm (Chamaedorea costaricana) (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries
/pakaja/(machine-generated) Spanish · model-generated
Pacaya is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Peru than in any other country.
- PEPeru≈1 in 2.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- COColombia≈1 in 610Kfew records
- ARArgentina1 in 1.3M
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.
- Peru (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 57 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈13,000 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Peru, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Pacaya
- Spanish:/pakaja/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Costa Rican bamboo palm (Chamaedorea costaricana)
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where the surname Pacaya is found
(measured from records)Pacaya 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: RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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)Pacaya is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Aymara, Es Ví>a fruta que dencro de fu vayn^-tiéne vnos granos ' «an4es cubiertos €omo deal
as a wordVocabulario de la lengua aymara
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.
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)6 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Pacaya mean, and where does it come from?
- Costa Rican bamboo palm (Chamaedorea costaricana) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Pacaya?
- In Spanish /pakaja/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Pacaya?
- Mondonomo estimates about 13 thousand people named Pacaya in Peru, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled pacaya. After it come Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Argentina; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Pacaya?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 142 people named Pacaya, about 1 in 1.5 million residents.
- How common is Pacaya compared with other names?
- In Peru, Pacaya is the 333rd most common surname of 173,371 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Pacaya?
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/pacayaThe 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, “Pacaya” — the 333rd most common surname in Peru. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.