Costa Family History

Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, southern French, and Italian: topographic name for someone who lived on a slope or river bank, or on the coast (ultimately from Latin costa ‘rib, side, flank’, also used in a transferred topographic sense), or a habitational name from any of numerous places called with this word.

Compare Spanish Cuesta and Lacosta. Jewish (Sephardic): adoption of the Portuguese surname (see 1 above) at the moment of conversion to Roman Catholicism. After the return to Judaism (generations later), some descendants retained the name their families used as Catholics.

American shortened (and altered) form of Greek Costas and its standard variant Kostas or of any of various patronymics and other derivatives of this personal name. Compare Kosta.

Greek (typically Cypriot): variant of the genitival patronymic Kosta. Americanized form of Albanian and Czech Kosta; Croatian Košta (see Kosta).