2022 Census
Launch of Names in Brazil was marked by exhibition and 1 million page visits
November 05, 2025 05h42 PM | Last Updated: November 08, 2025 12h59 AM
Launched on Tuesday morning (4), in a press conference at Casa Brasil IBGE, located downtown Rio de Janeiro (RJ), the new website NOMES NO BRASIL (NAMES IN BRAZIL) had more than 1 million views the following day. Attended by the IBGE director of Geosciences, Maria do Carmo Bueno, the general coordinator of Information Documentation and Dissemination, José Daniel Castro, and the deputy coordinator of Information Documentation and Dissemination, Leandro Albertini, the event gathered civil servants and guests and was broadcast streamed on Digital IBGE. Click here to visit NAMES IN BRAZIL.
At the main entrance of Palácio da Fazenda, a spoiler announced three of the most common names in the country. MARIA, JOSE, and SILVA, in giant letters, as an invitation to the launch of the new NAMES IN BRAZIL website. A brief stroll through the right wing of Casa Brasil IBGE, located on the ground floor of the building, allowed one to walk among the most frequent names and surnames of the population: hanging from the ceiling in increasing order of popularity.
Besides the ranking, the interactive immersion also explored trivia and details of Onomastics: it was possible to access, from an information stand, facts and interesting facts about the science of proper names. On the TVs at the exhibition, a ranking explored data on the 10 most frequent female names, 10 most frequent male names, and 10 most frequent surnames in the country.
Information about the Top 30, with the most frequent names in each category, was also displayed on lookup cards; they presented statistical data, but also etymological origins and the meanings of names. The visit is concluded with freebies, paper toys that could be assembled from the illustrations on the website and supplementary information about the exhibition and the website on a digital information stand. The in-person experience playfully shows the potential of the new website NAMES IN BRAZIL, the database of names of Brazilian society, updated with data from the 2022 Census.
“More than a survey of names is an invitation to consider our cultural richness, our social diversity which is evidenced in the way we name people, since names and surnames tell stories, reveal origins, traditions, family backgrounds, migration, that is, they refer to cultural transformations that traverse both the time and the territory,” Giulia Scappini, technical coordinator of the Census, explains.
During the launch, the Innovation and Development Manager, Rodrigo Rego, recalled the success of the first edition, launched in 2016: the first edition of Names in Brazil resulted from the use of completed identification data that were not used for the production of statistics. The processing of first names, taken from the data entry fields of the 2010 Census forms, generated results such as popularity rankings, a time series of incidence over the decades of birth, and the geographical distribution of these names.
The number of visits was so high that the team in charge needed to develop a solution to ensure the site could handle the demand: "At the time, the team needed to create a load balancing system to increase and reduce the processing availability of the servers according to the corresponding demand, a technology we had not used before and which is now applied to all the websites we manage," Rodrigo Rego explains.
From the moment it was launched, the new edition of NAMES IN BRAZIL had reached over 1 million views by the following day. Among the new features of this edition is the addition of surnames, a sign of the evolution of Census data collection: with the inclusion of a field for surnames, these new data could be processed and cataloged separately.
Juliana Soledade, PhD in Linguistics and researcher at the University of Brasília (UnB), revealed she has been a daily user of the first version of the tool for eight years. “I've been using the site since 2017, I wrote a book of over 500 pages. And all the names were verified on the IBGE website.”
Juliana is engaged in the creation of a Dictionary of Names now used in the country and emphasizes that the scarcity of data on Brazilian anthroponymy – the field of study of people's proper names – was remedied through the first edition of "Names in Brazil". As she was informed of the launch of the new updated edition, Juliana highlighted the importance of this project for the social sciences in the country. "IBGE has done something wonderful, which is to provide us with such data. It is simply great for our scope of study and has given us the tools we needed," she celebrated.
Click here to learn more about NAMES IN BRAZIL .
