Oviedo
A Spanish surname taken from the city of Oviedo in northern Spain.
The #4,362 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 37,906 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Oviedo is a habitational surname, originally used for someone who came from or was associated with the city of Oviedo in Asturias. The place name itself is ancient and is generally traced to a pre-Roman or early Latinized local name, though the deeper origin is not certain. In surname use, it simply means “from Oviedo.”
History
The name is strongly tied to Asturias and the historic kingdom centered on Oviedo, so it appears naturally in medieval Spanish records as a place-based identifier. As with many Spanish locational surnames, it later became hereditary and spread beyond the city itself. Today it is found in Spain and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, including the Americas.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Oviedo was an important political and ecclesiastical center in medieval northern Spain, which helped make the place name widely recognizable as a surname source.
From the historical record
“* The Spaniards have also Hermenegildo, from the Old German name Herminigild, found in the 6th cent, in the name of a son of the West-Gothic king Leuvigild, of a bishop of Oviedo in the 9th cent., a Spanish abbot in the 10th. The prefix is Armin or Ermin, p. 146. t KiLDERRY and Kilduff are Boston surnames, and seem…”
— The Teutonic Name-System applied to the family names of France, England and Germany