Tonks
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Son of Thom’ (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Tonks is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 33K(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 36Kfew records
- AUAustralia≈1 in 41K
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.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 191 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 33K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,100 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)‘Son of Thom’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Tonks is found
(measured from records)Tonks 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 33K | 4.3K | Tonks | 172 |
| AU Australia | ≈670 est. | ≈1 in 41K | — | Tonks | 120 |
| US United States | 588 | 1 in 566K | 617 | Tonks | 191 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈150 est. | ≈1 in 36K | — | Tonks | 41 |
| CA Canada | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 287K | — | Tonks | 51 |
| AG Antigua & Barbuda | ≈1 est. | ≈1 in 65K | — | Tonks | 1 |
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: Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020. 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Henry Tonksb. 1862GBBritish artist (1862-1937)
- Lewi Tonksb. 1897American physicist
- Lorna Tonksb. 1988AUAustralian swimmer
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)14 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Tonks mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Son of Thom’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Tonks?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.1 thousand people named Tonks in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tonks. After it come Australia, United States, New Zealand and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Tonks?
- In the United States, the national register counted 588 people named Tonks in 2010, about 1 in 566 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Tonks?
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/tonksThe 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, “Tonks” — ranked 1883rd in the United Kingdom (Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register)). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.