Paulo
Meaning
small; a classic Brazilian first name frequently chosen by Nikkei families for its ease in Portuguese
The story
Paulo is the Portuguese and Galician form of Paulus, small, and its first great bearer teaches a lesson in reading carefully: Saul of Tarsus did not change his name at conversion, scholars note; Paulus was simply his second name, the one he used with a Greco-Roman audience. Brazil took the small name and made it enormous. The 2022 census counted 1,331,639 people named Paulo, the eleventh most common first name in the country, and two of its bearers moved the world's bookshelves: Paulo Coelho, sold in the hundreds of millions of copies and translated into 83 languages, and Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed reshaped how teachers think about teaching. The American record holds a modest 5,031. A name that means small, worn by 1.3 million Brazilians; nobody said meanings were binding.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Paulo peaked in the 2000s and the 2020s in nearly equal measure.
Popularity in Brazil
1,331,639 people · the #11 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 153 · median age 42
Among people named Paulo living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1970s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 18,206 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Paulo deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Paulo 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 Paulo fits with your family’s names and surname.
Where Paulo travels
Samoan · Samoan form of Paul: small, humble
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