Where the Silva name comes from

Silva reaches back to the Latin word silva, which meant forest. It survives as a common noun in modern Portuguese, where silva means bramble. The surname grew from two roots rather than one, either that common noun or any of the several places in Iberia named Silva. It came down through Old Galician-Portuguese into both Galician and Portuguese, which also had the now obsolete spelling Sylva.

Galicia still carries the name widely, and in Brazil Silva is the most common surname of all. Emigration took it well beyond that, and it now ranks fifth among surnames in the French department of Val-de-Marne, outside Paris. Finland and Lithuania use Silva as a given name from a separate line, one that goes back to the Italian Silvia.