Vates
surname · Latin script
Meaning: A poet or bard who is divinely inspired
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Vates is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Spain than in any other country.
- ESSpain1 in 877K(measured from records)
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Spain (measured from records)
- Sources
- 36 (measured from records)
- 1 in 877K (inferred from the name graph)
57 people
Highest-authority source
Spain
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
A poet or bard who is divinely inspired.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Vates 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | 57 | 1 in 877K | 57 | Vates | 16 |
| FR France | — | — | — | Vates | 36 |
| US United States | — | — | listed | Vates | 8 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | 11 | — | — |
57 people counted by INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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: INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register). 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)
Vates 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.
In Latin, seer, soothsayer, diviner, prophet, prophetess
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latvian, genitive singular of vate
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In vo, dative plural of vat
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 4 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 57 | #40,786 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 57 | #40,491 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 11 | #134,717 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Vates mean, and where does it come from?
- A poet or bard who is divinely inspired. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Vates?
- In the etymology graph, Vate is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Vates have the most bearers?
- In Spain, the national register counted about 57 people named Vates, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled vates.
- Where is Vates most common?
- Vates is densest in Spain, where the national register counts about 1 in 877 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Vates?
- In Spain, the national register counted 57 people named Vates, about 1 in 877 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Vates?
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/vatesThe 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, “Vates”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.