Brazilian Last Name Generator

500 surnames as they are carried in Brazil, from Silva, Oliveira and Nascimento to dos Santos, Castelo Branco, Bündchen, Tanaka and Haddad. Accents, cedillas and the small particles de, da and dos are kept the way Brazilians write them.

About Brazilian last names

Brazilian surnames are Portuguese at the core. Silva, Santos, Oliveira, Souza and Pereira are carried by millions, and a large share of the stock comes from the landscape: Oliveira is the olive tree, Pereira the pear tree, Carvalho the oak and Pinheiro the pine. A second layer is devotional. Names such as dos Santos, de Jesus, da Conceição and do Nascimento were often given at baptism to people who had no family name on record, among them many enslaved and freed Brazilians.

Most Brazilians carry two surnames, the mother's first and the father's last, the reverse of the Spanish order, and the last one is the name usually passed on. Old families kept fixed pairs such as Castelo Branco, Almeida Prado and Buarque de Holanda. Filho, Neto, Júnior and Sobrinho are generational tags, not surnames, so they are not in the list.

Immigration added the rest. German speakers settled the South from 1824, Italians followed to São Paulo and the southern hills, the first Japanese ship docked in 1908, and Lebanese, Syrian, Polish and Eastern European Jewish families came in the same decades. That is why Bündchen, Scolari, Tanaka, Haddad and Leminski are all Brazilian surnames. Many Indigenous Brazilians use the name of their people as a family name, as in Krenak, Munduruku and Guajajara.

How to choose Brazilian last names

• For a full Brazilian name, pair two surnames from the list, the mother's first and the father's last, as in Oliveira Santos or Moreira da Silva. The particles de, da, do, dos and das stay in lower case.
• Use region for texture. Cavalcanti, Suassuna and Arraes sound like the Northeast, Dornelles and Canabarro like Rio Grande do Sul, and Junqueira, Gontijo and Drummond like Minas Gerais. German names cluster in the South, Japanese and Lebanese names in São Paulo, and Polish names in Paraná.
• Keep the accents and cedillas. Gonçalves, Araújo, Magalhães and Conceição are pronounced differently without them, and a Brazilian reader will notice at once when they are missing.
• A few surnames point straight at one famous Brazilian, such as Kubitschek, Niemeyer, Senna, Portinari and Bündchen. They are real family names, but readers will think of that person first.
• Names of peoples, such as Krenak, Pataxó and Munduruku, belong to living communities. Do your own reading before you give one to a character.

Frequently asked questions

What are the most common Brazilian last names?

Silva is the best known Brazilian surname, and Santos, Oliveira, Souza, Pereira, Lima, Ferreira, Costa, Rodrigues and Alves are among the names that follow it in most counts. All of them came from Portugal and all of them are in the list. Because they are so widespread, Brazilians rarely go by one of them alone and tend to add a second surname.

Why do so many Brazilian surnames start with de, da or dos?

The particles mean "of" or "from" and they agree with the word that follows, so you get de Jesus, da Conceição, do Nascimento, dos Santos and das Neves. Many of these names are devotional: dos Santos means "of the saints" and do Nascimento refers to the Nativity. The particle is written in lower case and is usually ignored when names are put in alphabetical order.

Are Filho, Neto and Júnior Brazilian last names?

No. They are generational tags that go after the surname when someone shares a full name with a relative: Filho means son, Neto grandson, Sobrinho nephew, and Júnior works as it does in English. They are not handed down as family names, so this list leaves them out.

Why does the list include Japanese, German and Arabic surnames?

Because millions of Brazilians carry them. Brazil is home to the largest community of Japanese descent outside Japan, which is where Tanaka, Oshiro and Higa come from, and the South has been home to families named Scherer, Backes and Bündchen for generations. Haddad, Maluf and Temer arrived with Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. A surname shows one line of a family's past and nothing more, so none of these names tells you how a person looks or what they believe.

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All 500 Brazilian last names