Paiva
surname · Latin script
Meaning: by the river Paiva in N Portugal
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/pajbɐ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Paiva is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country, where it is the 98th most common surname.
- BRBrazil1 in 507(measured from records)
- PTPortugal≈1 in 940
- PYParaguay≈1 in 1.1K
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 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 263 (measured from records)
- 1 in 507 (inferred from the name graph)
417,301 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
by the river Paiva in N Portugal. The river name is re¬ corded in the Middle Ages as Pavia, identical in form with the It. town Pavia (see Pavey 2).
Sources 1
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Paiva 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | #98 | 417,301 | 1 in 507 | 417K | Paiva | 208 |
| PT Portugal | #87 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 940 | — | Paiva | 141 |
| AR Argentina | #579 | 9,460 | 1 in 4.8K | 9.5K | Paiva | 71 |
| CN China | — | ≈7,700 est. | ≈1 in 182K | — | Paiva | 6 |
| PE Peru | #652 | ≈6,400 est. | ≈1 in 5K | — | Paiva | 54 |
| PY Paraguay | #179 | ≈6,400 est. | ≈1 in 1.1K | — | Paiva | 37 |
| UY Uruguay | #203 | 2,915 | 1 in 1.2K | 2.9K | Paiva | 35 |
417,301 people counted by IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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 — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Paiva 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.
In Portuguese, the river Paiva in N Portugal. The river name is recorded in the Middle Ages as Pavia, identical in form with the It. town Pavia (see Pavey 2).
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In Russian, Maksimko Samoilov Paiva, hunter. 1622.
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
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)
- Francisco Álvaro Bueno de Paivab. 1861BRBrazilian politician
- Félix Paivab. 1877PYPresident of Paraguay (1877-1965)
- Claudio Martínez Paivab. 1887ARArgentinian writer (1887-1970)
- Jorge de Paivab. 1887PTPortuguese fencer (1887-1937)
- Nestor Paivab. 1905USAmerican actor (1905-1966)
- Rubens Paivab. 1929BRBrazilian civil engineer and politician who disappeared during the military dictatorship
- Vanderlei Paivab. 1946BRBrazilian association football player (1946-2023
- Silvio Paivab. 1958BRBrazilian footballer
- Marcelo Rubens Paivab. 1959BRBrazilian writer, playwright and journalist
- Juliana Paivab. 1993BRBrazilian actress
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)
Attested in 37 sources across 24 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 417K | #105 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 9.5K | — |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 2.9K | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Paiva come from?
- by the river Paiva in N Portugal. The river name is re¬ corded in the Middle Ages as Pavia, identical in form with the It. town Pavia (see Pavey 2). Recorded by The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles.
- How do you pronounce Paiva?
- A machine transcription gives /pajbɐ/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
- What does the name Paiva mean?
- Recorded meaning: by the river Paiva in N Portugal.
- In which country does Paiva have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 417 thousand people named Paiva, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled paiva.
- Where is Paiva most common?
- Paiva is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 507 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Paiva?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 417,301 people named Paiva, about 1 in 507 residents.
- How common is Paiva compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Paiva is the 98th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Paiva?
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/paivaThe 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, “Paiva” — the 98th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.