Telles

surname · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/tɛlɨʃ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Telles is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country. In Cuba it is the 52nd most common surname.

rarermore common
  • CUCuba≈1 in 1.5K(inferred from the name graph)
  • NINicaragua≈1 in 5.9K
  • CRCosta Rica1 in 8.7K

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 (inferred from the name graph)

≈18,000 people, est.

Sources
181 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 1.5K (inferred from the name graph)

Cuba, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Telles 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 Telles is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
BR Brazil#347≈18,000 est.≈1 in 12K141Telles161
CU Cuba#52≈7,400 est.≈1 in 1.5K—Telles13
US United States—5,2301 in 64K5.2KTelles181
CO Colombia—≈1,400 est.≈1 in 36K1Telles44
AO Angola—≈1,300 est.≈1 in 25K—Telles7
NI Nicaragua#376≈1,000 est.≈1 in 5.9K—Telles8
CR Costa Rica#3605841 in 8.7K584Telles18
UY Uruguay—3741 in 9.1K374—20

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 — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; the co-datosgov-candidates register; TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names; 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)

Telles is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname10 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: English, German, Norwegian

    Also written Tellēs, Télles

  • a separate name4 spellings in the group

    Also written Tellēs, Télles, Tellés

  • French surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, Canada

    Also written Tellès, Télles, Tëllës

47 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)

Telles is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Galician, second-person singular present subjunctive of tellar

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

  • In French, feminine plural of tel

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

  • In Norwegian Bokmål, passive of telle

    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)

1850190019502000Jerônimo José Telles Júnior, b. 1851Gofredo da Silva Teles Júnior, b. 1915Raymond Telles, b. 1915Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles, b. 1922Sylvia Telles, b. 1934Sergio Telles, b. 1936Maria Bethânia, b. 1946Cynthia Telles, b. 1953Francisco Ribeiro Telles, b. 1953Alex Telles, b. 1992

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)

FormalPrezado(a) Telles,Dear Telles, (English)
InformalPrezado(a) Telles,Hello, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 27 sources across 17 countries.

Official registers attesting Telles
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—34K#552
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020105.2K#6,493
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.8K#6,743
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020004.5K#6,850
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—584#601
UY UruguayINE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public)—374—
CO ColombiaColombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co)—1#115
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 2

  • 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

How do you pronounce Telles?
A machine transcription gives /tɛlɨʃ/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
In which country does Telles have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 18 thousand people named Telles in Brazil, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled telles.
How common is the name Telles?
In the United States, the national register counted 5,230 people named Telles in 2010, about 1 in 64 thousand residents.
How common is Telles compared with other names?
In Brazil, Telles is the 347th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Telles?

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

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, “Telles” — the 347th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Telles parses inside a full name →