Bënë
surname · Latin script
Bënë is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle English bene, from Old English bēn (“prayer, request, petition, favour, compulsory service”), from Proto-Germanic *bōniz (“supplication”).
- UYUruguay1 in 19K(measured from records)
- HRCroatia1 in 53K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 210K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 12 (measured from records)
- 1 in 19K (inferred from the name graph)
769 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Bene in US United States, IN India.
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)- Middle Englishbene(measured from records)
- Old Englishbēn“prayer“prayer, request, petition, favour, compulsory service”(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*bōniz“supplication”(measured from records)
From Middle English bene, from Old English bēn (“prayer, request, petition, favour, compulsory service”), from Proto-Germanic *bōniz (“supplication”). Cognate with Danish bøn (“prayer”), Swedish bön (“prayer”), Icelandic bæn (“prayer”), Icelandic bón (“request”). Related to ban. See also boon, bee.
Cited for this meaning 8
- Dizionario dei cognomi italiani
- 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
- Wiktionary
- Családnevek enciklopédiája
- Dicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bënë 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 769 | 1 in 433K | 787 | Bene | 12 |
| IN India | 310 | 1 in 4.3M | 310 | Bene | 3 |
| UY Uruguay | 182 | 1 in 19K | 182 | — | — |
| HR Croatia | 80 | 1 in 53K | 80 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 56 | 1 in 893K | 56 | — | 1 |
| CH Switzerland | 40 | 1 in 210K | 40 | — | — |
| FI Finland | 23 | 1 in 242K | 23 | — | — |
| NO Norway | 20 | 1 in 273K | 20 | — | — |
769 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 2020; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bënë mean, and where does it come from?
- From Middle English bene, from Old English bēn (“prayer, request, petition, favour, compulsory service”), from Proto-Germanic *bōniz (“supplication”). Recorded by Dizionario dei cognomi italiani and 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples) and 6 other sources.
- In which country does Bënë have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 769 people named Bënë, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bene.
- Where is Bënë most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Bënë is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 19 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Bënë?
- In the United States, the national register counted 769 people named Bënë in 2010, about 1 in 433 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bënë?
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/b%C3%ABn%C3%ABThe 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, “Bënë”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.