Medina surname meaning

Medina is primarily a place surname. It identifies someone from a locality called Medina, including important Spanish towns such as Medina-Sidonia and Medina del Campo. The place-name comes through Arabic madīna, “city,” a reminder of the Iberian layers behind the modern surname. Sephardic Jewish families also carry Medina, sometimes through the same Iberian geographic vocabulary and sometimes through their own documentary histories. A Medina family in the United States therefore cannot be assigned automatically to one town. De Medina is an expanded form seen in records, while accents and regional spellings may shift. The core catalog meaning remains habitational: a person identified with a city or place called Medina.