Mauro

Meaning

“Italian, Spanish and Portuguese form of Maurus, Latin for 'North African, Moorish'”

The story

Mauro is the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese form of Maurus, a Latin name meaning North African, Moorish. Its saint comes with the best commute in hagiography: as Gregory the Great tells it, when the boy Placidus was swept into the lake, Benedict sent his first disciple Maurus, who ran out to the rescue across the water. Nine centuries later a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro drew one of the great world maps of his age, around 1450, and got a crater on the Moon named for him; Apollo 14 landed on the Fra Mauro formation in February 1971, which is farther than most names travel. Brazil counted 144,544 Mauros in 2022, median age 51, with the big decades mid-century: 20,278 born in the 1950s, 37,888 in the 1960s. The American record climbed steadily to 1,212 in the 2000s. A monk's name that walked on water and reached the Moon.

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Popularity, 1890–2024

Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Mauro peaked in the 1990s and the 2020s in nearly equal measure.

Popularity in Brazil

144,544 people · the #233 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 1,404 · median age 51

Among people named Mauro living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1960s than in any other decade.

The census also counted 698 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.

Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022

Names that fit alongside Mauro

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The Mauro deep dive

Written for you · $1.99 →

Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Mauro 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 Mauro fits with your family’s names and surname.

Both reports, explained →

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