Mendoza
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: from a place in the province of Alava, so called from Basque mendi mountain + otz cold + the def. art. -a. Meneely see McNeilly Menel see Meynell (The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 33 countries · latest register: RENIEC, 2025
/menˈdosa/(recorded in a dictionary) Spanish · from Wiktionary
Mendoza is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Mexico than in any other country, where it is the 21st most common surname. Mendoza is also written მენდოზა in Georgian and Μεντοσα in Greek.
- NINicaragua≈1 in 97(inferred from the name graph)
- ECEcuador1 in 141
- PEPeru≈1 in 150
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Mexico (inferred from the name graph)
- #149 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 496 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 97 (inferred from the name graph)
≈830,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Nicaragua, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Mendoza in other scripts: Georgian and Greek
(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.
How to pronounce Mendoza
- Spanish:/menˈdosa/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
- English:/mɛnˈdoʊzə/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)'person from Mendoza', Spain ('the cold mountain').
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
How Mendoza is read
(measured from records)Mendoza 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.
- Spanish72%
from a place in the province of Alava, so called from Basque mendi mountain + otz cold + the def. art. -a. Meneely see McNeilly Menel see Meynell
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
- English16%
'person from Mendoza', Spain ('the cold mountain').
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
river, prov, town, Argentina
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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 the surname Mendoza is found
(measured from records)Mendoza 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MX Mexico | #21 | ≈830,000 est. | ≈1 in 157 | 15K | Mendoza | 265 |
| PH Philippines | #14 | ≈430,000 est. | ≈1 in 268 | — | Mendoza | 182 |
| US United States | #348 | 242,771 | 1 in 1.4K | 243K | Mendoza | 496 |
| PE Peru | #18 | ≈220,000 est. | ≈1 in 153 | 437K | Mendoza | 165 |
| VE Venezuela | #17 | ≈190,000 est. | ≈1 in 147 | 1.3K | Mendoza | 144 |
| EC Ecuador | #8 | 120,115 | 1 in 141 | 120K | Mendoza | 103 |
| BO Bolivia | #491 | ≈82,000 est. | ≈1 in 151 | — | Mendoza | 91 |
| NI Nicaragua | #8 | ≈71,000 est. | ≈1 in 97 | — | Mendoza | 90 |
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: RENAPO — name frequencies (eduardofv dataset); the pe-reniec-name-freq register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; asosab — SAIME ID-card names (1896–1996); 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 recorded senses
(measured from records)Mendoza 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.
habitational name from several places in the provinces of Arava and Biscay called Mendoza, named with Basque mendi ‘mountain’ otz ‘cold’ + the definite article -a.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Filipino, a common surname from Spanish [in turn from Basque], equivalent to Spanish Mendoza, the 5th commonest in the Philippines, widespread across the Tagalog-speaking regions, but most widely concentrated in Batangas, Quezon and Oriental Mindoro provinces
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Basque, a hamlet in Vitoria, Álava, Basque Country, Spain
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)- César Vallejob. 1892PEnot in their usual namePeruvian writer
- Guillermo Lassob. 1955ECnot in their usual name55th President of Ecuador from 2021 to 2023
- Dayana Mendozab. 1986VEVenezuelan model, actress and beauty pageant contestant
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)Evidence
(measured from records)53 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 33 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Mendoza come from?
- 'person from Mendoza', Spain ('the cold mountain'). Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Mendoza?
- It depends on the language: in Spanish /menˈdosa/ (Wiktionary); in English /mɛnˈdoʊzə/ (Wiktionary).
- What does the name Mendoza mean?
- In Spanish, from a place in the province of Alava, so called from Basque mendi mountain + otz cold + the def. art. -a. Meneely see McNeilly Menel see Meynell
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Mendoza?
- Mondonomo estimates about 833 thousand people named Mendoza in Mexico, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mendoza. After it come Philippines, United States, Peru and Venezuela; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Mendoza?
- In the United States, the national register counted 242,771 people named Mendoza in 2010, about 1 in 1.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Mendoza compared with other names?
- In Mexico, Mendoza is the 21st most common surname of 206,803 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Mendoza?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mendozaThe 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, “Mendoza” — ranked 22nd in Mexico (RENAPO). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.