Golonka
surname · Latin script
Meaning: nickname from either golonka ‘hand of pork’ or golony ‘clean-shaven’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 11 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
/ɡoʊˈɫoʊŋkə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Golonka is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- PLPoland
- USUnited States
- DEGermany
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)nickname from either golonka ‘hand of pork’ or golony ‘clean-shaven’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world
(measured from records)Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)Golonka 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 Polish, ham hock, pork knuckle (cut of meat at the joint between the leg and foot of a hog)
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)- Józef Golonkab. 1892PLPolish officer
- Jan Golonkab. 1894PLPolish Righteous Among the Nations
- Bronisława Golonkab. 1916PLPolish Righteous Among the Nations
- Jan Golonkab. 1928PLPolish engineer and politician
- Arlene Golonkab. 1936USactress (1936–2021)
- Jozef Golonkab. 1938SKCzechoslovak ice hockey player and coach
- Jan Golonkab. 1944PLPolish geologist
- Leszek Golonkab. 1946PLPolish engineer and researcher
- Ewa GolonkaPLPolish researcher, biologist and biochemist
- Iwona GolonkaPLPolish chemist
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)21 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2.2K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2.2K | #1,150 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2.1K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2.1K | #1,278 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 521 | #39,678 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 516 | #42,094 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 493 | #46,548 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1981 | 16 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1941 | 16 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1931 | 14 | — |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 11 | #36,792 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1961 | 11 | — |
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 Golonka mean, and where does it come from?
- nickname from either golonka ‘hand of pork’ or golony ‘clean-shaven’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Golonka?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡoʊˈɫoʊŋkə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Golonka have the most bearers?
- Golonka is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Golonka?
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/golonkaThe 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, “Golonka”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.