Santos

Todos os Santos falls on 1 November, and it is the one feast in the Portuguese calendar that names nobody in particular. It belongs to the whole company of saints at once, the named and the forgotten together, and behind it sits the Latin sanctus. A child born into that week, or carried to the font while the parish was still keeping it, could be handed the day itself instead of a single patron: dos Santos, of the saints. That is the whole of the name. It records a date on the church calendar rather than a father, a village or a trade, which is a rarer thing in European naming than it sounds.

The company it keeps in the Portuguese surname stock is a liturgical year laid out as family names. Dos Reis is the Epiphany, the day of the Wise Kings. Ramos is the branches of Palm Sunday, Pascoal is Easter, Trindade is Trinity Sunday, do Espírito Santo is the Feast of the Holy Ghost, das Chagas the Feast of the Five Wounds of Christ. Do Nascimento takes the Nativity, da Assunção the Assumption, da Visitação the Visitation, da Anunciação the Annunciation, da Conceição the Immaculate Conception. Santos is the one that takes all of them in a single word, and it is the only one whose meaning does not narrow when the family that bears it grows.

The Latin root threw off a wide brood before the modern spelling settled. Sanctus produced Sanctius, Santious, Sancti, Santis, Santi, Sante, Santiz, Santiso, Santizo and Santotis; the singular Santo survives on its own; and the Iberian and Italo-Romance grammar of the thing yields De Santo, Del Santo, De Santos, Senti and Sentis. The Maltese carry it as well. The plural with the article is the Portuguese and Spanish settlement of the question, and it is the form that travelled: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay all took these variants off the emigrant ships out of Iberia.

The people living in what is now Portugal before the Romans arrived identified themselves by a single name, or by a name followed by a patronym, and the names were ethnic markers: Celtic Mantaus, Lusitanian Casae, Iberian Sunua, Conii Alainus. Roman onomastics were adopted slowly after the end of the first century AD, bringing the tria nomina of praenomen, nomen and cognomen, the nomen naming the gens inherited down the male line. None of that produced anything a modern family carries. It produced the habit of a second element.

Hereditary surnames arrived in western Europe from the eleventh century, well after the eastern Roman world had them, and they spread downward from the people with property to record. Medieval Spain ran the patronymic system in its pure form: Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez, but his son Juan was Juan Álvarez, not Juan Rodríguez, the name resetting every generation. Only when that reset stopped did those patronymics freeze into the family names that now head the Spanish tables. By the fourteenth century the fixed inherited surname was the norm among the English and the Scots, and Wales followed after the union of 1536.

That fourteenth-century line is where the modern Santos story properly begins, because a feast-day name is worthless as a surname until it stops describing the person and starts describing the family. A man baptised for All Saints was simply a man with a devotional name. His descendants, none of them born anywhere near the feast, were a family called Santos, and the day had become an inheritance instead of a fact.

A religious surname in Portugal usually came through one of three doors, and Santos went through all three. The first is plain devotion. A personal name expressing the piety of the parents or the godparents, or simply marking the day the child arrived, hardened into a family name and stopped being a statement about the individual at all. Once fixed it passed down like any other, so that the great-grandchildren of a single 1 November birth were all of the saints whatever the day of their own baptism happened to be.

The second door is the church step. Children born to unmarried or destitute parents were left in public places, or anonymously in a foundling wheel, and were claimed, baptised and raised in Catholic orphanages by priests and nuns. With no father's name to give them, the clergy named them for the circumstances: the date they were found, or the feast being kept when they were christened. The mechanism is visible in every Catholic country that ran orphanages, in the Italian Esposito, Innocenti, Trovato and Abbandonata and the Dutch Vondeling and Verlaeten. All Saints' has a fixed date and a full church, and a child left at the door in that week walked out of it named for the feast.

The third door is conversion. A surname with a religious meaning could be taken by an ancestor who came into the Catholic church and needed the fact on the record. Portugal put that choice to its Jews in 1497 as conversion or expulsion, and Cruz became the most common surname among the crypto-Jews of Belmonte. Espírito Santo is the other name repeatedly pointed at, because the cult of the Holy Spirit flourished after 1496 among New Christians, and because the least corporeal person of the Trinity offended a secret faith least. Where conversion was not forced, scholars find converts more often took a patronymic, or the surname of their godfather.

Dos is a contraction doing two jobs at once, de plus the masculine plural article, so dos Santos reads as of the saints where de Sousa reads only as from Sousa. The same machinery gives da Cunha, das Neves and do Rosário. Current Portuguese convention writes these connectives in lower case, which is why Luís dos Santos looks in print like a man with a small word loose in the middle of his name rather than a compound surname, though a compound surname is exactly what it is.

The filing rules treat the preposition as invisible. Sousa and de Sousa are different names but both sort under S, and Luiz Pereira da Silva is addressed as Mr Silva, never Mr da Silva. A dos Santos is therefore Mr Santos. A telephone directory or a bibliography renders him Santos, António Borges, dropping the connectives and any affix such as Filho. A school register does the opposite and alphabetises the full name by the personal name, because so many Portuguese use a different combination of their surnames from one context to the next that ordering them by surname produces errors.

The rule breaks at the language border. The Portuguese-American novelist John Dos Passos is filed and addressed by English practice under Dos Passos, capital D and preposition included, which no Portuguese list would do with the same name. The same fate meets a dos Santos who emigrates: the small word that Portuguese swallows gets promoted abroad into part of the surname, and the family ends up sorted under D in the country it moved to and under S in the one it left.

Portuguese law requires a child to carry at least one personal name and one surname from a parent, and caps the whole at two personal names and four surnames. The Ministério da Justiça glosses the limit as a maximum of six simple or compound words. The maternal surnames usually come before the paternal ones, though the order can be reversed, and where the father is unknown or has not acknowledged the child, only the mother's names are used. Four slots is a great deal of room, and a name as widespread as Santos frequently occupies one of the middle ones where nobody reads it.

The law also lets a child take a surname that neither parent legally bears, provided the family can prove an ancestor used it, so Santos can skip a generation and be pulled back in. Work it through with the pairing the rule is usually illustrated with. José Santos Almeida and Maria Abreu Melo may name a daughter Joana Melo Almeida, or Joana Gabriela Abreu Santos Almeida, or Joana Gabriela Abreu Melo Santos Almeida, and she will be known by the final element, Almeida. Reorder the surnames at registration and the same girl becomes Joana Melo instead.

At the other extreme, a single surname is rare in Portugal and usually means both parents had the same one, since António Santos Santos is a legally acceptable name that families go out of their way to avoid. A married woman with two personal names and six surnames raises no eyebrows: Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha de Almeida Santa Rita Santos Abreu is an unremarkable construction, in which Santos Abreu has almost certainly arrived from a husband and the woman herself answers to Maria do Carmo Abreu. Since 1977 either spouse may take the other's names, and in Portugal both usually change: José Santos Almeida and Maria Abreu Melo become José Santos Melo Almeida and Maria Abreu Melo Almeida.

Portuguese personal names are treated as ordinary nouns and bound by ordinary spelling rules. Section XI of the Acordo Ortográfico, in force in Portugal and Brazil, states that anthroponymic and toponymic proper nouns, being Portuguese or absorbed into Portuguese, are subject to the same rules established for common nouns. Santos benefits from that more than most names do, because santos is a live plural noun that every speaker writes the same way. There was no archaic form to defend and no antique spelling worth the trouble of preserving.

Compare the fights fought over everything else. In Portugal the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado enforces a defined list of permitted personal names and turns away misspellings, archaisms and anything containing k, y or w; Luiz is the archaic form of Luís, and the film-maker Manoel de Oliveira simply kept the registration he had been born with. Dead historical figures are respelt to current rules whether or not they would have recognised the result, which is why the poet is Luís de Camões and not Luiz de Camoens. Surnames alone escape the policing, so Athayde and Telles survive alongside Ataíde and Teles.

Brazil went the other way entirely. There is no naming law there beyond a bar on obscene or ridiculous names at the cartório de registro civil, so archaic, correct and invented spellings sit side by side, Felipe next to Philippe next to Fellype. A name with as much liturgy behind it as Santos might have been expected to splinter in that climate. It did not, and the reason is grammatical rather than pious: it is a common noun in the plural, and the only way to misspell it is to misspell the word.

Lúcia dos Santos was born in 1907 and died in 2005, and lived as a Carmelite nun under the name Sister Lúcia of Jesus. She was the seer of Our Lady of Fátima. A woman carrying the surname of all the saints is remembered as the witness to a claim about one particular figure in that company.

Her name and her subject belong to the same stratum of Portuguese naming. The Marian half of the devotional surnames is enormous: Neves from Our Lady of the Snows, Penha from Our Lady of the Bluff of France, das Dores from Our Lady of Sorrows, Graça from Our Lady of Grace, Patrocínio from Our Lady of Patronage, Paz from Our Lady Mediatrix of Peace, Luz from Our Lady of the Divine Light, da Conceição from the Immaculate Conception. Santana takes Saint Ann, São João takes the Baptist, dos Anjos takes the day of Michael, Raphael and Gabriel. Marian invocation names travel as a block inside a long name, which is why do Carmo and its neighbours are rarely separated by the people who bear them.

The habit runs deeper than surnames. Traditional Portuguese personal names were drawn from the calendar of saints, which is why António, João, José, Francisco, Pedro and Manuel, and Maria, Ana, Isabel, Teresa and Joana, dominate the registers. Portuguese does not form matronymics at all; names like Catarino and Mariano that look like them are references to saints, most likely from the practice of giving a child the name of the saint on whose day they were born. Santos is that same instinct applied to the one day of the year when the calendar names all of them together.

The best-documented family of the name is Spanish in origin and Colombian in career. The line came out of Cádiz with settlers who crossed the Atlantic and put down in Santander. Juan Santos fathered Ysidoro Manuel Santos, recorded as the first of the family born in Colombia, in 1647; Ysidoro fathered Pedro; and Pedro fathered Antonia Santos, who became a heroine of the independence struggle.

The branch that took the family into national life descends from José María Santos through Francisco Santos Galvís (1848-1900), who married Leopoldina Montejo (1850-1905). Their sons ran a generation of Colombian journalism and politics between them: Hernando (1883-1921), Enrique (1886-1971), Eduardo (1888-1974), Guillermo (1892-1967) and Gustavo (1894-1961). Eduardo Santos Montejo owned the newspaper El Tiempo and served as president of Colombia from August 1938 to August 1942, with his wife Lorenza Villegas de Santos (1899-1960) as first lady.

The next generation doubled the knot: Enrique Santos Castillo (1917-2001) married Clemencia Calderón and his brother Hernando Santos Castillo (1922-1999) married her sister Helena. Enrique's eldest son, Juan Manuel Santos, born 1951, held the ministries of foreign trade, finance and national defence before becoming the thirty-third president of Colombia. Hernando's eldest, Francisco Santos Calderón, born 1961, served as the eighth vice-president and later as ambassador to the United States; Francisco's son Gabriel, born 1990, sits in the Chamber of Representatives, while Rafael Santos Calderón carried on the family trade in newsprint. Only five Colombian families have produced two presidents of the same surname: the López, the Holguín, the Ospina, the Lleras and the Santos.

José Manuel Cerqueira Afonso dos Santos (1929-1987) is the bearer most Portuguese would name first, though almost nobody uses the surname to do it. He performed as Zeca Afonso, and Zeca is not a stage invention but standard Portuguese hypocoristic machinery: José gives Zezé and Zeca, and Zeca in turn gives Zequinha once the diminutive infix is added. A singer, composer and poet went out under a nickname of one of the commonest given names in the country while the feast of All Saints sat unread in the tail of his legal name.

The surname recurs across the same century of Portuguese letters and music. Ary dos Santos (1937-1984) wrote poetry; Joly Braga Santos (1924-1988) composed and conducted; Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos (1889-1950) worked in philosophy. José dos Santos Ferreira (1919-1993) wrote from Macau, at the far end of the Portuguese language's reach, and Emanuele Rodriguez dos Santos, who died in 1764, practised architecture as a Portuguese in Rome. On the Spanish side the same root does the same work, as with the writer Domingo Santos (1941-2018).

None of these men is related to any of the others in any traceable way, and that is the point of a feast-day surname. A trade name gathers the descendants of smiths and a place name gathers the people of one valley, but 1 November fell on every parish in the Portuguese world at once, and each parish generated its own unconnected Santos. The name is not a family. It is a date, worn by everyone the date landed on.

António dos Santos Ramalho Eanes, born 1935, went from general to politician carrying two different eras of Portuguese naming in one string. Santos is the feast. Eanes is a patronymic worn so smooth that few readers see it: it descends from the mediaeval Iohannes and means son of João, which puts a father from before surnames existed at the end of a modern name and a church calendar in the middle of it.

The patronymic class Eanes belongs to is the other great engine of Portuguese surnames, and its products are everywhere: Henriques, Pires, Rodrigues, Lopes, Nunes, Mendes, Fernandes, Gonçalves, Esteves and Álvares, where the -es ending carries son of. Some end in iz or ins instead, like Muniz from Monio and Martins from Martim. Many have lost their root because the personal name behind them died out, so that Lopes hides Lopo, Mendes hides Mendo or Mem, Soares hides Soeiro, Sanches hides Sancho, Antunes hides Antão and Peres hides the archaic Pero. Devotional names never suffer that decay. All Saints' Day is still on the calendar, so Santos never stopped meaning what it meant when it was given.

The name has kept its place on Portuguese ballot papers since the republic. Isabel Santos, born 1968, Manuel António dos Santos, born 1943, and Maria Isabel Coelho Santos, born 1968, all sat in national politics, and each appears in public in the shortened form with the preposition dropped, exactly as the filing rules predict.

Two of the most-said Portuguese names in the world carry the feast in the middle where nobody looks. Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro, born 1985, is known by his two personal names. José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix is known by Mourinho, which is neither his last surname nor his first. Both break the convention that a Portuguese is known by the final element of the name, and both quietly record that somewhere up the line an ancestor was named for 1 November.

The pattern repeats through the Portuguese game. Paulo Jorge dos Santos Futre, born 1966, hid it in the same slot; Fernando Santos, born 1954, played and then managed under it plainly; Artur Santos (1931-2025) carried it through the domestic era; André Bernardes Santos, born 1989, plays in midfield with it, and Ricardo Santos took it onto a golf course. The surname is not a badge of anything shared beyond a calendar, which is why so many squads have fielded two unrelated ones at the same time without anybody thinking it worth a remark.

The Spanish side of the border inverts the order and changes what a second-position Santos means. Spanish practice puts the father's surname first and the mother's second, so José García Torres and María Acosta Gómez produce Pablo García Acosta, the exact opposite of the Portuguese default. A Spaniard such as the football manager Fernando Castro Santos, born 1952, therefore carries Santos from his mother, where a Portuguese in the same position carries it from his father. The long jumper Héctor Santos, born 1998, and the singers who use the bare form show the name settled on the Castilian side as thoroughly as on the Portuguese.

England's commonest surnames are a trade list: Smith heads it, with Jones, Williams, Brown, Taylor, Davies and Wilson behind, and a four-year study at the University of the West of England that closed in 2016 found more than ninety per cent of the 45,602 surnames in the British Isles native to Britain and Ireland. Portugal has almost nothing of the sort. Surnames from professions there are few, and thin at that: Serrador for a sawman, Monteiro for a hunter of the hills, Guerreiro for a warrior, Caldeira for a cauldron-maker, Cubas for a cooper, Carneiro for a shepherd, Peixe for a fisherman or fishmonger.

What Portugal built instead were places and prayers. The locative names run to hundreds, from towns and rivers such as Braga, Coimbra, Guimarães, Lisboa, Porto, Serpa and Lima, down to the exact spot of a house within a village: Fonte by the fountain, Azenha by the water-mill, Eira by the threshing floor, Tanque by the community cistern, Cimo on the upper part and Fundo on the lower, Cabo at the far end. Alongside them stand the descriptive nicknames, Veloso for a hairy man, Magro for a thin one, Gago for a stammerer, Romeiro for a pilgrim.

Set the feast names beside that and the shape of the Portuguese name-stock is clear. Where an English family was fixed by what the first bearer did for a living, a Portuguese family was fixed by where it stood or by what the church was keeping the week the child was named. Santos belongs to the second kind, and it is the broadest example of it, because a working trade or a named village limits how many people can claim it and a universal feast does not.

Silva is the immovable object of Lusophone naming. It is borne by 34,030,104 Brazilians, 16.76 per cent of the population in the largest study made of it, and it heads the tables in Portugal as well. Silva means woods or forest, and it belongs to the vegetation class of locative surnames that identified a family by what grew where they lived: Matos for forest, Campos for meadows, Teixeira for a stand of yews, Cardoso for thistles, Macedo for an apple orchard, Azevedo for a holly wood, Amaral for a plantation of the bitter grape used for wine.

Santos comes at frequency from the opposite direction. The tree names ask where a family stood; the feast name asks when a child arrived. A place can only produce the people who lived at it, but 1 November arrived in every parish in the Portuguese world in the same week each year, and it kept arriving. Add the foundlings named for the day they were left at a church, and the converts who took a name that announced a new faith, and the surname multiplies on three independent schedules rather than one.

In Portugal itself the name has not moved from what it started as. Emigration has scattered it, the courts have never had cause to regulate it, and the four-surname system has hidden it in the middle of long names for generations at a stretch, but the meaning has not shifted an inch since the first parish clerk wrote it down. It is a feast day, spoken as a family: not the saint of one village or one chapel, but the whole company at once, on the single day of the year that belongs to all of them.