Vital

surname · Latin script

Meaning, in Portuguese: vital (relating to, or characteristic of life)

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

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

Vital is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • BRBrazil≈1 in 12K(inferred from the name graph)
  • PHPhilippines≈1 in 38K
  • USUnited States1 in 66K

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)

≈17,000 people, est.

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
179 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 1.0K (inferred from the name graph)

Dominica

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

VitalLatin(measured from records)
ვითალGeorgian(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)

David ben Salomon Vital and Hayyim ben Joseph Vital; rabino/cabalista; linked to Turkey, Greece and Safed

Sources 1

  • Dicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…

Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.

How Vital is read(measured from records)

Vital is one spelling over 4 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 3 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.

  • Portuguese38%

    vital (relating to, or characteristic of life)

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

  • Spanish30%

    From Latin Vitalis, from uita 'life': 'alive' or 'life-giving'

    as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios

  • English20%

    relationship name from the Old French personal name Vitel (from Latin vitalis ‘pertaining to life, vital’), the name of ten or more Christian saints. This was a common given name for a time in England after the Conquest, both in its learned form Vitalis and in its northern French form Vial . Some examples may belong under (2).

    as a nameThe Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland

    Relating to or characteristic of life.

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

  • French5.9%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Vital in French.

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)

Vital 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 Vital is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
BR Brazil#371≈17,000 est.≈1 in 12K6.5KVital136
US United States—5,0041 in 66K5KVital179
PH Philippines—≈2,900 est.≈1 in 38K—Vital28
FR France—≈1,600 est.≈1 in 42K2.1K—3
PT Portugal#513≈1,300 est.≈1 in 7.7K—Vital81
CH Switzerland—2401 in 35K240Vital16
DM Dominica—731 in 1K73——

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 — Nomes (census name API); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025. 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)

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

  • French surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, Philippines

    Also written Vitål, Vîtäl, Vïtàl

  • Hindi surname6 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu, Bangla

    Also written Vitál

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Ṿiṭal

  • Hindi given name67 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia

    Languages: Hindi, English, Urdu

    Also written Vithal, Vittal, Vitala, Vittala, విఠల్

62 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)

Vital 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.

  • David ben Salomon Vital and Hayyim ben Joseph Vital; rabino/cabalista; linked to Turkey, Greece and Safed

    as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…

  • nome amuleto; vida

    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)

150016001700180019002000Samuel Vital, b. 1598Andrea Vital, b. 1855Naum Vital, b. 1889Jean-Jacques Vital, b. 1913Alfredo Gutiérrez, b. 1943Francisco Vital, b. 1954Lionel Vital, b. 1963Martha Vital, b. 1963Yedidya Vital, b. 1984

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 Sr. Vital,Dear Mr Vital, (English)
InformalOlá Vital,Hi Vital, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 70 sources across 38 countries.

Official registers attesting Vital
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020105K#6,739
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.8K#6,713
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020003.7K#8,294
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)2024240#5,347
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1991180—
DM DominicaDominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025202573#155

Reference works 6

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • 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

Where does the name Vital come from?
David ben Salomon Vital and Hayyim ben Joseph Vital; rabino/cabalista; linked to Turkey, Greece and Safed Recorded by Dicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,….
What does the name Vital mean?
In Portuguese, vital (relating to, or characteristic of life)
In which country does Vital have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 17 thousand people named Vital in Brazil, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled vital.
Where is Vital most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Vital is densest in Dominica — about 1 in 1.0 thousand people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
How do you pronounce Vital?
A machine transcription gives /bital/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
What are other forms of the name Vital?
In the etymology graph, Vidal, Vitale and Vitali are forms of the same name in other languages.
How common is the name Vital?
In the United States, the national register counted 5,004 people named Vital in 2010, about 1 in 66 thousand residents.
How common is Vital compared with other names?
In Brazil, Vital is the 371st most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Vital?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

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

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, “Vital” — the 371st most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Vital parses inside a full name →