Anselmo
Meaning
Italian, Spanish and Portuguese form of Anselm, from Germanic ansi "god" and helm "helmet, protection"
The story
Anselmo wears armor twice: the Germanic elements ansi "god" and helm "helmet, protection" built Anselm, and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese polished it into Anselmo. The famous bearer is Saint Anselm, the eleventh-century monk from Aosta who became archbishop of Canterbury and argued, gently and in Latin, that faith could be reasoned about. Brazil took the name to heart: 16,673 men named Anselmo in the census, 3,262 born in the 1960s and 4,848 in the 1980s. The American record is a study in persistence: 127 boys in the 1910s, and from the 1930s through the 2000s the decade count never once leaves the band between 215 and 299, eight straight decades inside one narrow corridor, before easing to 143 in the 2010s and 71 so far this decade. A god-helmet does not rust. It just sits there, protecting.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Anselmo has stayed rare in US records the whole time: no peak decade to name.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
16,673 people · the #1,196 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 12,195 · median age 46
Among people named Anselmo living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1980s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 62 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Anselmo deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Anselmo truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Anselmo fits with your family’s names and surname.
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