Portuguese baby names, in Portugal and in Brazil

Two countries, two very different rules

Portuguese is spoken by more people in Brazil than anywhere else, and the naming rules in the two countries could hardly be less alike. Portugal's civil registry, the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, works from a list of names admissible at registration: names must be Portuguese in form, must not be a surname, and must make the child's sex clear. Foreign spellings are generally refused, which is why Portugal has Tomás and not Thomas, and Sofia and not Sophia.

Brazil applies almost no such restriction. A registrar may refuse a name that would expose a child to ridicule, and that is broadly the limit. The result is a naming culture that borrows, invents and respells freely, and a name pool far larger than Portugal's. The Brazilian statistics institute, IBGE, publishes a census-based name search that shows how any name has risen and fallen by decade, which is an unusual and rather good public tool.

The names, and what they mean

Duarte is the one most likely to surprise. It is Edward, arriving through medieval royal marriages and thoroughly naturalised, and nothing about it now suggests an English original.

Surname order runs the opposite way to Spanish

Spanish surname order is father's family name then mother's. Portuguese is the reverse: the mother's family name comes first and the father's last, so the final surname is the one that functions as the principal family name. Portuguese practice also allows more than two surnames, and a child may carry three or four.

Get this backwards and you address someone by the wrong half of their name. It is the single most useful thing on this page for anyone dealing with Portuguese or Brazilian paperwork, and it is routinely got wrong by systems designed around Spanish naming.

Brazilian naming is its own thing

Thiago and Tiago are Brazilian short forms of Santiago, and Thiago was 50th in the United States in 2025 with 5,835 babies on the Social Security Administration list — a Brazilian and Portuguese form travelling on an American ranking. Brazil also has a strong tradition of names built from English and French elements respelled to Portuguese sound rules, and of names invented by combining parents' names. None of that would clear the Portuguese registry, which is the clearest demonstration of how far the two countries have diverged.

What the Portuguese rule actually rules out

The registry's requirements are more specific than a general prohibition on odd names, and they explain a great deal about how Portuguese naming looks. Names must be written in Portuguese orthography, so the letters k, w and y are effectively excluded from native forms and English or French spellings of otherwise acceptable names are refused. Surnames may not be used as first names, which rules out the whole Anglo-American habit of turning family names into given ones — no Portuguese Harper, Hudson or Carter. Diminutives are generally not registrable as the legal name, even where they are what the child will actually be called. And a name has to indicate the child's sex.

The effect is a strikingly stable and homogeneous set of names in Portugal, at a moment when most of Europe's name pools are widening fast. Whether that is a virtue is a matter of taste; that it is a deliberate policy rather than an accident of fashion is not.

Two Portugueses, and how they sound

European and Brazilian Portuguese differ enough that the same written name is said noticeably differently in each. European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels heavily, so final syllables can almost disappear; Brazilian Portuguese keeps them fuller and palatalises certain consonants, which is why a Brazilian and a Portuguese speaker will say Duarte or Beatriz with a clearly different rhythm. We do not print respellings for either, because a single English approximation would have to choose one country and mislead about the other. A Portuguese dictionary with audio, or a speaker, will settle it in seconds.

Saints, and the Portuguese calendar

A large part of the Portuguese repertoire comes from the church calendar, and several names are specific to Portugal in a way that is easy to miss. António is claimed by Lisbon as much as by Padua, and the June festivities around him are among the country's biggest. Fátima, from the apparitions of 1917, became a girls' name in the twentieth century; the place name is itself Arabic, after the Prophet's daughter, which makes it one of the more unusual etymological journeys any European name has taken. Salvador, Benedita and Madalena all come from the same devotional vocabulary.

Portugal also uses compound names extensively, in the Spanish manner: Maria João and João Maria are both ordinary, and Maria compounds account for a large share of women's names across generations.

Portuguese names in Britain

Britain has a substantial Portuguese and Brazilian population, and the names appear in the ONS full list for England and Wales, which publishes every name given to three or more babies. Santiago at 153 boys in 2025 is the clearest example. Several names in the table above are also Spanish or Italian in form and will be counted together with those uses, since ONS counts spellings rather than origins — there is no way to tell from the dataset whether a Beatriz is Portuguese, Spanish or Brazilian.