Bone
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) From a medieval nickname for a good person, from Old French bon ‘good’; (ii) from a medieval nickname for a very thin person (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 26 countries · latest register: INEC, 2024
/bone/(machine-generated) Spanish · model-generated
Bone is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ecuador than in any other country: 18,680 people, counted by INEC in 2024.
- ECEcuador1 in 905(measured from records)
- UYUruguay1 in 2.6K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 13K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Ecuador (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 394 (measured from records)
- 1 in 905 (inferred from the name graph)
18,680 people, 2024
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Ecuador
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Bone
- Spanish:/bone/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(i) From a medieval nickname for a good person, from Old French bon ‘good’; (ii) from a medieval nickname for a very thin person.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Bone is found
(measured from records)Bone 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC Ecuador | 18,680 | 1 in 905 | 19K | Bone | 25 |
| US United States | 10,692 | 1 in 31K | 11K | Bone | 394 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈5,400 est. | ≈1 in 13K | listed | Bone | 214 |
| CA Canada | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 20K | — | Bone | 124 |
| AU Australia | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 14K | 1 | Bone | 134 |
| UY Uruguay | 1,304 | 1 in 2.6K | 1.3K | — | — |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈300 est. | ≈1 in 17K | — | Bone | 67 |
18,680 people counted by INEC — civil registry names, 2024. 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; INEC — civil registry names; the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)Bone 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 Old French bon 'good'; first attested Edward le Bon 1204 Cur (O)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, ‘good’, from OF bon good (see Bon). 2. nickname for a thin, bony individual; see Bain 2. Vars. (of 1): Bonn, Bunn; Boon.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Edward le Bon 1204 Cur (O); Rocelin le Bun 1255 RH (W); Walter le Bone 1296 SRSx; Thomas Bonne 1379 LLB H. OFr bon ‘good’. For Bone, v. also BOON.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, kale, gale, seed or stone of fruits; neck- bone, mbdld-gale; shoul- der-bone, kpaki gale; hip-bone, kpdki
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)- Scott Cordelle Boneb. 1860USAmerican politician (1860-1936)
- Homer Boneb. 1883USUnited States federal judge (1883-1970)
- Peter Boneb. 1952GBBritish politician (born 1952)
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)43 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 26 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bone mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) From a medieval nickname for a good person, from Old French bon ‘good’; (ii) from a medieval nickname for a very thin person. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Bone?
- In the etymology graph, Bein is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Bone?
- In Spanish /bone/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Bone?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted about 19 thousand people named Bone, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bone. After it come United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Bone most common?
- Bone is densest in Ecuador, where the national register counts about 1 in 905 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Bone?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 18,680 people named Bone in 2024, about 1 in 905 residents.
What do you want to know about Bone?
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/boneThe 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, “Bone” — ranked 225th in Ecuador (INEC, 2024). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.