Soto

surname · Latin script

Meaning: person from Soto or El Soto, a place name in Spain meaning 'the grove'

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

Soto is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Chile it is the 6th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • CRCosta Rica1 in 118(measured from records)
  • CLChile≈1 in 163
  • DODominican Republic≈1 in 379

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)

144,451 people, 2010

#266 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

3 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
499 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 118 (inferred from the name graph)

Costa Rica

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

SotoLatin(measured from records)
СотоCyrillic(measured from records)
ΣωτοGreek(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)

person from Soto or El Soto, a place name in Spain meaning 'the grove'.

Sources 1

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

Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Soto 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 Soto is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#481144,4511 in 2.3K145KSoto499
CL Chile#6≈110,000 est.≈1 in 1631Soto185
PE Peru#48≈82,000 est.≈1 in 389—Soto129
CO Colombia#87≈78,000 est.≈1 in 62730Soto178
AR Argentina#7676,9031 in 59177KSoto142
VE Venezuela#82≈62,000 est.≈1 in 463517Soto102
CR Costa Rica#2543,1971 in 11843KSoto127
DO Dominican Republic#50≈28,000 est.≈1 in 379—Soto78

144,451 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: SRCEI — Nombres más comunes (guaguas, 1920–2021); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); asosab — SAIME ID-card names (1896–1996); the co-datosgov-candidates register; TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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)

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

  • English surname24 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Peru

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Sōtō, Sötö, Sōto, Sótó, Soto'

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Šoto

  • Lao surname13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Laos, Chile, Thailand, United States

    Languages: Lao, Thai

    Also written โสโท, Sotho, โสโต, Sötö, Sótó

  • Norwegian surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Peru, Norway, Sweden

    Languages: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish

    Also written Śöťö, Sötö

78 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)

Soto is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, A school of Zen Buddhism in Japan, based on gradual attainment of enlightenment through meditation.

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

  • In Indonesian, a kind of soup, whose taste depends on the ingredients of the whole dish

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

  • In pi, nominative/vocative/accusative singular of sotas

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

  • In Japanese, Rōmaji transcription of そと

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

  • In Galician, cellar

    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)

1400160018002000Hernando de Soto, b. 1500Marco Aurelio Soto, b. 1846Talisa Soto, b. 1967Blanca Soto, b. 1979Elkin Soto, b. 1980Maite Alberdi, b. 1983Angel Manuel Soto, b. 1983Gary Medel, b. 1987Iñigo Pérez, b. 1988Juan Soto, b. 1998

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 51 sources across 31 countries.

Official registers attesting Soto
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020145K#188
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010144K#191
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000107K#257
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—77K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—43K#46
CO ColombiaColombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co)—30#86
CR Costa RicaTSE — Consulta de nombres (Padrón Nacional Electoral name enumeration)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 6

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 Soto mean, and where does it come from?
person from Soto or El Soto, a place name in Spain meaning 'the grove'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Soto have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 144 thousand people named Soto, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled soto.
Where is Soto most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Soto is densest in Costa Rica — about 1 in 118 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Soto?
In the United States, the national register counted 144,451 people named Soto in 2010, about 1 in 2.3 thousand residents.
How common is Soto compared with other names?
In the United States, Soto is the 481st most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Soto?

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

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, “Soto” — the 481st most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Soto parses inside a full name →