Amparo
Feminine · “shelter”
Amparo is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 3,316 girls against 17 boys since 1880.
Amparo is a masculine noun in Spanish — el amparo, shelter, protection — and it is a woman's name because the full form is Maria del Amparo, Mary of the Refuge. The grammar belongs to the noun. The name belongs to the Virgin.
How old is the name Amparo?
Amparo first appears in US birth records in 1911 — 114 years ago. The typical Amparo alive today was born around 1952, making them about 73 years old. About 2,100 people named Amparo are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Amparo most popular?
Amparo peaked in 1928, reaching #845 nationally. Today it ranks #10917, 10,072 places below that high. See the whole 1928 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From amparo to Amparo
The story of Amparo
Spanish Catholic naming took the titles of the Virgin and gave them to girls unchanged, which is why so many Spanish women's names are abstract nouns rather than names. The devotion behind this one is Valencian: the city's patroness is the Mare de Deu dels Desamparats, Our Lady of the Forsaken, and Amparo and Desamparados are Valencian names before they are anything else. The word has a second life with nothing to do with the church. In Mexican law the juicio de amparo is an action a person brings to protect their rights against the state, invented in the nineteenth century and since adopted across Latin America and in the Philippines. In much of the Spanish-speaking world the word now means both the shelter of the Virgin and the shelter of the constitution.
Meaning
shelter, protection, refuge
Spanish amparo, from amparar, to shelter or protect. As a name it is short for Maria del Amparo, one of a set of Marian titles given directly to girls: Consuelo, consolation; Socorro, help; Remedios, remedies; Mercedes, mercies; Pilar, pillar; Dolores, sorrows.
How the name formed
- amparo
- Maria del Amparo
- Amparo
Related forms: Amparo · Empar · Amparo
Pronouncing Amparo
am-PAH-roh
Three syllables, stress on the middle. The r is a single tap of the tongue rather than the English r, but an English speaker saying am-PAR-oh will be understood everywhere it is used.
Nicknames for Amparo
Limited
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1911
- Most girls named
- 192773 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #845reached in 1928
- Change vs 2023
- 0.0%8 in 2025, from 8
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Amparo in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Amparo in Spanish — same name
- Empar in Catalan — same name
- Amparo in Portuguese — same name
Amparos among us
people named Amparo are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 200,908 born in 2025 was named Amparo
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Loree test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Amparo's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Loree climbed just as high around 1910, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Loree's path sketches the road Amparo is walking now.
Amparo sits in the calm middle of the cycle — neither chasing a wave nor sliding off one. Middle-of-the-cycle names age slowly and predictably.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Amparo beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Amparo in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- A documented meaning that is a plain, kind word rather than an abstraction.
- Said the same way across Spain and Latin America.
- It carries a specific place — Valencia — for families who want one.
- The word is grammatically masculine and the spelling is recorded for a small number of boys; nearly everyone who carries it is a woman, so a boy named Amparo will be corrected on every form.
- Outside Spanish-speaking families it reads as a place or a surname.
- It is strongly represented among older generations in Spain and Mexico and carries that generation's sound.
- It is also a legal term across Latin America, which is either a good second meaning or a distraction.
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What they receive
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Amparo
Feminine · #10917 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Amparos are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 2,100 people named Amparo are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Amparo in 2025?
- Amparo ranks #10917 among US girl names in 2025, with 8 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Amparo?
- About 1 in every 200,908 US girls born in 2025 was named Amparo — 8 in all.
- Will my child share the name Amparo with classmates?
- Amparo will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Amparo
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Edythe#10917 · Tessie#10917 · Drusilla#10917 · Eugenie#10917 · Ivah#10917 · Karri#10917 · Claribel#10917 · Myrtle#10917
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Amparo? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Amparo and another name?
See them side by side — full stats, history and a gentle verdict.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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