Bonke
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/boŋkə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bonke is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.
- DEGermany≈1 in 93K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 2.5M
- NLNetherlands1 in 46K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 81 (measured from records)
- 1 in 46K (inferred from the name graph)
≈870 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Netherlands
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bonke 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | ≈870 est. | ≈1 in 93K | — | Bonke | 81 |
| KE Kenya | ≈400 est. | ≈1 in 134K | — | Bonke | 7 |
| NL Netherlands | 376 | 1 in 46K | 376 | Bonke | 20 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 192K | — | Bonke | 16 |
| US United States | 132 | 1 in 2.5M | 132 | Bonke | 74 |
| DK Denmark | 95 | 1 in 62K | 95 | — | — |
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; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)
Bonke is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Dutch, singular present subjunctive of bonken
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Peter Bonkeb. 1942Danish actor
- Regine Bonkeb. 1948DEGerman sculptor
- Christian Holten Bonkeb. 1973DKDanish documentary filmmaker and screenwriter
- Bjarke Bonkeb. 1990Danish cyclist
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 18 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 376 | #5,376 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 132 | #129,047 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 118 | #132,259 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 106 | #152,339 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 95 | #5,725 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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
- How do you pronounce Bonke?
- A machine transcription gives /boŋkə/ (IPA) for German.
- In which country does Bonke have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 865 people named Bonke in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bonke.
- Where is Bonke most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Bonke is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 46 thousand people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Bonke?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 376 people named Bonke in 2007, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bonke?
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/bonkeThe 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, “Bonke”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.