Rodolfo
- Pronunciation
- [Ro-dol-fo]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Spanish Form Of Rudolph Famous Wolf
- Origin
- Spanish
About the Name Rodolfo
Rodolfo is the Spanish and Italian form of Rudolf, a name built on two Germanic elements: hrōd, meaning "fame" or "glory," and wulf, meaning "wolf" — producing the traditional meaning "famous wolf" or "glory of the wolf." The wolf held a complex and powerful place in Germanic warrior culture, associated with strength, cunning, and an untamed freedom that made wolf-compound names highly prestigious in early medieval Europe. The name traveled from the Germanic tribes into Latin as Rodulfus, then developed into Rodolfo in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian peninsula, where it acquired the warmth and musicality characteristic of Romance-language given names. It has been used continuously in Spanish and Italian communities for centuries.
The painter Rodolfo Amoedo is a notable bearer of this name: a Brazilian academic painter who carried the late nineteenth-century French history-painting tradition home to Rio de Janeiro and shaped two generations of Brazilian artists through his teaching.
Rodolfo entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 2000 at its peak rank of #421 and maintained a presence in the chart through 2015, sitting at #931 in that final year with 228 boys. More than 6,000 boys were named Rodolfo within the SSA top-1000 era. Its gradual retreat from the top-1000 reflects the broader shift in American naming away from fully Spanish-language forms toward hybrid or English-inflected options, though within Spanish-speaking communities Rodolfo retains its full prestige and warmth as a classic masculine name with ancient Germanic roots and centuries of Iberian cultural resonance.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Rodolfo
US Popularity History (2000–2015)
Annual US births named Rodolfo by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2000 with 587 boys named Rodolfo (boy rank #421 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2015, ranked #931 for boys (228 US births). That's 510 places below its 2000 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Famous People Named Rodolfo
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Rodolfo.
- Rodolfo Amoedo was a Brazilian history painter born in Salvador, Bahia.
Looking for names like Rodolfo?
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Compare Rodolfo to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Rodolfo against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).