Kos
surname · Latin script
Meaning: of uncertain origin. It may be an ornamental name from Slavic kos ‘blackbird’, as in 1, or alternatively it may be from Hebrew kos ‘drinking glass’ or Yiddish kos ‘goblet’, ‘cup’, probably applied as
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈkɑs/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kos is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Poland than in any other country. In Slovenia it is the 18th most common surname.
- HRCroatia1 in 847(measured from records)
- SISlovenia1 in 572
- PLPoland1 in 5.2K
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.
- Poland (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 88 (measured from records)
- 1 in 572 (inferred from the name graph)
7,303 people, 2026
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Slovenia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
- Slavickos(measured from records)
- Hebrewkos(measured from records)
of uncertain origin. It may be an ornamental name from Slavic kos ‘blackbird’, as in 1, or alternatively it may be from Hebrew kos ‘drinking glass’ or Yiddish kos ‘goblet’, ‘cup’, probably applied as a metonymic occupational name for someone who made glasses or cups.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kos 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.
7,303 people counted by dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames), 2026. 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: DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); MVČR — living population register 2017; naše jména — 2016 MVČR snapshot; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007). 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)
Kos 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.
from a Turkish loanword kos ‘ram’ (from Old Turkish qoc, Ottoman Turkish qog)', perhaps a metonymic occupational name for a shepherd but more probably a nickname for someone thought to resemble the animal.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
nickname from kos ‘blackbird’, denoting someone thought to resemble the bird in some way, for example someone with a good singing voice. This is a very common surname in Slovenia and Croatia.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
possibly a nickname for a gossip or a smooth-talker, from Middle High German kbse, koese ‘talk’, ‘chat’. Compare Koser.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
metonymic occupational name for a basketmaker, from kos ‘basket’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from a Zeeland personal name derived from Constantius (see Constant).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Milko Kosb. 1892ITSlovene historian (1892–1972)
- Gojmir Anton Kosb. 1896ITSlovenian artist (1896-1970)
- Ćiril Kosb. 1919HRCroatian catholic priest (1919–2003)
- Zdeněk Kosb. 1951CZCzech basketball player
- Marjeta Šašel Kosb. 1952SISlovene archaeologist and classical philologist
- Mateja Kosb. 1958SIresearcher
- Marta Kosb. 1965SISlovene diplomat and politician
- Matevž Kosb. 1966SISlovene literary historian and essayist
- Lovro Kosb. 1999SISlovenian ski jumper
- Pedro KosBRDirector, producer and film editor
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)
Attested in 40 sources across 21 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR Croatia | DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form) | 2021 | 5K | #44 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) | 2021 | 4.4K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3.7K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3.7K | #591 |
| SI Slovenia | stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank) | — | 3.7K | #10 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3.6K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3.6K | #625 |
| CZ Czechia | naše jména — 2016 MVČR snapshot | — | 1.9K | #636 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 1.9K | #635 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 1.9K | #638 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 1.5K | #1,006 |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kos mean, and where does it come from?
- of uncertain origin. It may be an ornamental name from Slavic kos ‘blackbird’, as in 1, or alternatively it may be from Hebrew kos ‘drinking glass’ or Yiddish kos ‘goblet’, ‘cup’, probably applied as… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Kos?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈkɑs/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Kos have the most bearers?
- In Poland, the national register counted about 7.3 thousand people named Kos, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Kos most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kos is densest in Slovenia — about 1 in 572 people — even though Poland holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kos?
- In Poland, the national register counted 7,303 people named Kos in 2026, about 1 in 5.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Kos compared with other names?
- In Slovenia, Kos is the 18th most common surname of 13,062 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kos?
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/kosThe 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, “Kos” — the 18th most common surname in Slovenia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.