Medina

surname · Latin script

Meaning, in Spanish: habitational name from any of the several places, as for example Medina-Sidonia in Cadiz province and Medina del Campo in Valladolid, so called from Arabic medlna ‘city’

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

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

Medina is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Venezuela it is the 18th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • VEVenezuela≈1 in 153(inferred from the name graph)
  • PYParaguay≈1 in 168
  • DODominican Republic≈1 in 179

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.

China (inferred from the name graph)

≈210,000 people, est.

#187 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
504 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 153 (inferred from the name graph)

Venezuela, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

MedinaLatin(measured from records)
ΜεδιναGreek(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 Medina; place-name from Arabic medina 'city'

Sources 1

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

Attested across 14 languages in the etymology graph.

How Medina is read(measured from records)

Medina is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 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.

  • Spanish75%

    habitational name from any of the several places, as for example Medina-Sidonia in Cadiz province and Medina del Campo in Valladolid, so called from Arabic medlna ‘city’. The surname is also borne by Sephardic Jews.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

    the several places, as for example Medina-Sidonia in Cadiz and Medina del Campo in Valladolid, so called from Arabic medina city. The surname is also borne by Sefardic Jews, the reason(s) for its adoption being unclear. Vars. (of i); Van der Meer, Vermeer(en), Termeer, Meerman. Meerov see Mayer

    as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles

    Medina (the capital city of the Medina region, Saudi Arabia, holy to Islam)

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

  • English13%

    person from Medina; place-name from Arabic medina 'city'

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

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)

Medina 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 Medina is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China—≈210,000 est.≈1 in 6.5K—Medina17
AR Argentina#21192,6711 in 236193KMedina158
US United States#429188,4971 in 1.8K188KMedina504
VE Venezuela#18≈190,000 est.≈1 in 153—Medina125
CO Colombia#39≈130,000 est.≈1 in 38193Medina215
EC Ecuador—62,2331 in 27262KMedina93
DO Dominican Republic#19≈59,000 est.≈1 in 179—Medina102
PY Paraguay#28≈43,000 est.≈1 in 168—Medina77

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); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; the co-datosgov-candidates register; INEC — civil registry 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)

Medina is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname30 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Medína, Mëdïnä, Médina, Mèdina, Mëdina

  • a separate name8 spellings in the group

    Also written Medína, Mediña, Médina, Me-Dina, Mediņa

  • Russian given name143 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Kazakhstan, India, Kyrgyzstan

    Languages: Russian, Uzbek, Hindi

    Also written Мадина, Madina, Modina, Мадіна, Mədinə

  • Indonesian surname15 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, Peru, Philippines, United States

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Madinah, Medina', 'Medina, Mëdinä, Mèdina

  • Kazakh given name63 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine

    Languages: Kazakh, Russian, Uzbek

    Also written Медина, Медине, Медіне, Медіна, Medine

97 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)

Medina 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.

  • from the city; bourgeois

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

  • from the citadel

    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)

190019201940196019802000Patricia Medina, b. 1919Lina Medina, b. 1933Ofelia Medina, b. 1950Danilo Medina, b. 1951Ramón Medina Bello, b. 1966Carlos Tenorio, b. 1979Ricardo Medina, Jr., b. 1979Anabel Medina Garrigues, b. 1982Stefan Medina, b. 1992Facundo Medina, b. 1999

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)

FormalEstimado/a Medina,Dear Medina, (English)
InformalEstimado/a Medina,Hello, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 107 sources across 54 countries.

Official registers attesting Medina
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—193K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010188K#133
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020186K#132
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000139K#176
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202462K#50
EC EcuadorINEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024)2024660—
CO ColombiaColombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co)—93#32

Reference works 9

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 Medina come from?
person from Medina; place-name from Arabic medina 'city' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Medina?
A machine transcription gives /medina/ (IPA) for Spanish.
What does the name Medina mean?
In Spanish, habitational name from any of the several places, as for example Medina-Sidonia in Cadiz province and Medina del Campo in Valladolid, so called from Arabic medlna ‘city’.
In which country does Medina have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 215 thousand people named Medina in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled medina.
How common is the name Medina?
In Argentina, the national register counted 192,671 people named Medina, about 1 in 236 residents.
How common is Medina compared with other names?
In Venezuela, Medina is the 18th most common surname of 83,461 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Medina?

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

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, “Medina” — the 18th most common surname in Venezuela. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Medina parses inside a full name →