Where the Maldonado name comes from

Maldonado is a surname carried in both Spanish and Portuguese. It began in Spanish as a nickname, formed as a compound of two words, mal and donado. Francisco Maldonado, born in 1480, led the rebel Comuneros in Spain and was captured and beheaded at the Battle of Villalar in 1521.

English borrowed the name directly from Spanish. In the 2010 United States Census, Maldonado was the 249th most common surname in the United States, belonging to 121,526 individuals.