Velázquez, Velásquez or Velasquez — one name, three spellings.

Z or S

The Castilian form is Velázquez, with z. In most of Spanish America, however, z and s are pronounced identically — the feature linguists call seseo — so colonial scribes wrote what they heard, and Velásquez with s became the settled form in many countries. Both are correct; both are old; and because Velasco is written with an s, the s-form is etymologically just as sound as the z-form.

The people profiled on this site show the pattern clearly. Bearers from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Honduras and Panama — Patricia Velásquez, Ramón J. Velásquez, Iván Velásquez Gómez, Wilmer Velásquez — use the s. Bearers from Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay — Diego Velázquez, Consuelo Velázquez, Nydia Velázquez, Fidel Velázquez — use the z. Families carry their spelling with them when they migrate, which is why both forms are common in the United States.

The accent

In Spanish the name is stressed on the second syllable — ve-LÁS-quez — which makes it a palabra esdrújula, and Spanish orthography requires every esdrújula to carry a written accent. Without it, the rules would have a reader stress the last syllable, ve-las-QUEZ. That is why Velázquez and Velásquez are always accented in Spanish-language documents, and why the accent is not a decoration but part of the spelling.

English-language systems, from typewriters to databases, dropped it. In the United States and the Philippines the name is therefore written Velasquez or Velazquez with no accent at all, and most bearers there — Cain Velasquez, Nadine Velazquez, Regine Velasquez, John R. Velazquez — write it that way themselves. A few, such as Lizzie Velásquez and Baldemar Velásquez, keep the accent as a matter of identity. Machine-readable passport zones cannot print it either: ICAO Doc 9303 restricts the two lines at the foot of the data page to the letters A–Z, digits and the filler <, so VELAZQUEZ appears there unaccented even when the printed name above keeps the accent.

Pronunciation

In Spain: be-LATH-keth, with the z and the final z as the “th” of think. In Latin America: be-LAS-kes. In American English: vel-ASK-ez or veh-LAS-kehz, the v pronounced as in English and the final syllable as “kez”.

What the U.S. census counts

The Census Bureau’s list of surnames occurring 100 or more times in the 2010 census gives a precise picture of the American spellings:

Spelling	Rank in the U.S.	People (2010)	Hispanic
Velasquez	398	80,364	92.2 %
Velazquez	530	63,736	96.0 %
Velasques	23,333	1,091	93.7 %
Velazques	48,530	435	97.7 %
Total		145,626

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census.

Taken together, more than 145,000 people in the United States carried one of the four spellings in 2010, between 92 and 98 per cent of them identifying as Hispanic. The rare forms with a final s — Velasques, Velazques — are almost always the product of a clerk’s error that a family later kept.

Other variants you may meet: Vélasquez, the French spelling, as in the Avenue Vélasquez beside the Parc Monceau in Paris; and, in genealogical records, the older forms Velasques and Belázquez. In Portuguese-speaking Brazil the name is written without any accent, as for the fighter Juliana Velasquez.

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Profiles are compiled from public sources for general information. They are not affiliated with or endorsed by the people described. Corrections are welcome at carol@velasquez.info.