Bossu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Variant of Bosse; nickname meaning “hunchbacked person”
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: Familienaam.be, 2008
Bossu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in France than in any other country.
- FRFrance≈1 in 26K(inferred from the name graph)
- BEBelgium1 in 31K
- DEGermany≈1 in 890Kfew records
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.
- France (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 201 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 26K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,600 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
France, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Variant of Bosse; nickname meaning “hunchbacked person.”
Cited for this meaning 1
- Tên Họ Người Việt Nam
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bossu 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.
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: INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); the xinhua-italian-manual register. 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)Bossu is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In French, hunchbacked, round-shouldered
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In se, third-person singular present indicative of bossut
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In nrm, humped
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)- Antonin François Bossub. 1809French medical botanist (1809 - 1897)
- Louis Bossub. 1857FRFrench magistrate
- Auguste Bossub. 1889FRFrench architect
- Jean Bossub. 1912FRFrench architect (1912–1983)
- Laurent Bossub. 1957FRFrench politician
- Evelyne Bossub. 1961FRFrench politician
- Peter Bossub. 1965BEBelgian writer and politician
- Aurélien Bossub. 1982FRFrench politician
- Charles Bossub. 1984BEBelgian archaeologist (1984-)
- Juliette Bossub. 2000FRFrench artistic gymnast
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)8 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1961 | 403 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1951 | 396 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1971 | 394 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1941 | 388 | — |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 380 | #4,168 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1981 | 363 | — |
| BE Belgium | Statbel — Noms de famille (family names) | — | 358 | #4,589 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1931 | 313 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1921 | 304 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 268 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1901 | 260 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1911 | 236 | — |
Reference works 1
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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 Bossu mean, and where does it come from?
- Variant of Bosse; nickname meaning “hunchbacked person.” Recorded by Tên Họ Người Việt Nam.
- In which country does Bossu have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.6 thousand people named Bossu in France, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bossu.
- How common is the name Bossu?
- In Belgium, the national register counted 380 people named Bossu in 2008, about 1 in 31 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bossu?
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/bossuThe 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, “Bossu”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.