Bold
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) from a medieval nickname for a courageous or intrepid person; (ii) person who lives or works at the main house in a particular place; (iii) person from Bold, Lancashire
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 13 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Bold is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Mongolia than in any other country, where it is the 61st most common surname.
- DEGermany≈1 in 50K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 90K
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 100Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Bold itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Mongolia (inferred from the name graph)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 247 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 23K (inferred from the name graph)
≈6,300 named Болд, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Romania, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Болд in MN Mongolia.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(i) from a medieval nickname for a courageous or intrepid person; (ii) person who lives or works at the main house in a particular place; (iii) person from Bold, Lancashire.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Bold is found
(measured from records)Bold counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MN Mongolia | #61 | ≈6,300 est. | ≈1 in 556 | listed | Болд | 63 |
| DE Germany | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 50K | listed | Bold | 91 |
| US United States | — | 1,423 | 1 in 234K | 1.6K | Bold | 247 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 263K | — | Bold | 13 |
| RO Romania | — | ≈820 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Bold | 17 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈770 est. | ≈1 in 90K | listed | Bold | 129 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈68 est. | ≈1 in 77K | — | Bold | 29 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; the reaney-english-surnames-1991 register; the dfa-band-1 register. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Bold is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from OE bold ‘dwelling-house’, from Bold (Lancashire), The Bold (Shropshire), or local; first attested Heremer de la Bolde 1176 P (St)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, from ME bold, OE bald ‘stout-’; first attested Richard Bolde 1206 P (Lancashire)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, (i) Richard Bolde 1206 P (La); Henry Bolde, le Bolde 1317 AssK, 1327 SRSx; William Boulde 1428 FrY; Robert Bowde 1563 FrY. ME bold, OE bald (WS beald) ‘stout-
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Courageous, daring.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, ngima, njama bengo yelé, i.e. to have dry, unpitying eyes
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Felix Boldb. 1988DEGerman actor
- Bold Ganjaichb. 1995MNMongol judoka (1995-)
- Jeff Boldactor
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)25 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 13 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bold mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) from a medieval nickname for a courageous or intrepid person; (ii) person who lives or works at the main house in a particular place; (iii) person from Bold, Lancashire. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Bold?
- In the etymology graph, Baldo and Baud are forms of the same name in other languages.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Bold?
- Mondonomo estimates about 6.3 thousand people named Болд in Mongolia, more than in any other country we hold. After it come Germany, United States, Indonesia and Romania; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Bold?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,423 people named Bold in 2010, about 1 in 234 thousand residents.
- How common is Bold compared with other names?
- In Mongolia, Bold is the 61st most common surname of 18,547 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bold?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/boldThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Bold” — the 61st most common surname in Mongolia. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.