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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • Spanish and Portuguese : nickname for an ugly or stupid person, from Spanish mal donado ‘ill-favored’. The phrase is a compound of mal ‘badly’ + donado ‘given’, ‘endowed’, past participle of donare ‘to give’, ‘to bestow’.
  • Spanish and Portuguese : habitational name from Maldonado, a village in the province of Albacete.

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