Raul

Meaning and origin

Raul belongs to the Germanic name family meaning “counsel” and “wolf.” It developed from Radulf, whose two elements are rat, “counsel” or “advice,” and wolf. The same family includes English Ralph and French Raoul, names whose modern appearances conceal their shared background.

Raul is an established form in Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, and it has also been adopted in other languages. Spanish normally writes the name Raúl, with an accent on the u. American records commonly show the unaccented spelling Raul, placing both forms within a familiar international name family.

Sound and related forms

Spanish Raúl is pronounced rah-OOL, with two syllables and the strongest emphasis on the second. Portuguese pronunciations differ in their opening r and final l; in Brazilian Portuguese the beginning can sound closer to an English h, while the ending can approach a w sound.

French Raoul preserves a related two-vowel spelling, while Ralph and Ralf are more compact written forms. The change from Radulf to these modern names illustrates how differently one old name developed across Europe. Raul keeps an open sequence of vowels followed by a final l, giving it a distinctly different rhythm from the English Ralph.

Raúl González and football

Spanish footballer Raúl González Blanco is one of the best-known bearers of the accented form. As a Real Madrid forward, he made 741 appearances and scored 323 goals. His first-team debut came in October 1994, and he scored his first goal for the club the following week in a match against Atlético de Madrid.

His European record included Champions League victories in 1998, 2000, and 2002. He scored in the latter two finals, giving the name a connection with several memorable moments in the club's history. He also represented Spain more than one hundred times.

His playing career later included Schalke 04, Al-Sadd, and the New York Cosmos before his retirement in 2015. This namesake gives Raul a particularly visible Spanish sporting association, alongside the name's independent use in Portuguese and other languages.

Popularity in the United States

Raul has a long-established American presence. Its best rank for boys was 190th in 1980, while its largest annual count came in 2000, with 1,519 births. The different peak years show that a name's rank among its peers and its total number of births need not reach their maximum together.

It ranked 443rd in 2015, 557th in 2020, and 634th in 2025, when 440 boys received the name. Its American use has become less frequent than at its peak, while the spelling remains recognizable within a much wider international tradition.

How popular is Raul?

In 2025, Raul ranked #634 among boys in the United States, with 440 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for boys in 1904; its largest annual count was 1,519 in 2000. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.