Kneebone
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kneebone is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Perhaps from a medieval nickname for someone with knobbly knees.
- AUAustralia
- USUnited States
- NZNew Zealand
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)
Perhaps from a medieval nickname for someone with knobbly knees.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)
Kneebone 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 English, ‘knee-bone’, from OE cnēow + bān; first attested John Knebone 1469
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, origin, perhaps in part a nickname for someone with knob¬ bly knees, but probably also in part an alteration by folk etymology of a habitation name from Camebone in the par¬ ish of Wendron, Cornwall. The placename is first recorded in 1298 as Camebwen, from Corn, cam pile of rocks (cf. Cairns) + a second element of uncertain form and mean¬ ing.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, from Middle English kne ‘knee’ (Old English cneow) + bone ‘bone’ (Old English ban), presumably a nickname for someone with nobbly knees.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Harry Kneeboneb. 1876AUAustralian politician (1876–1933)
- Frank Kneeboneb. 1905AUSouth Australian politician (1905-2004)
- Geoffrey Kneeboneb. 1918GBBorn: 24 February 1918 in Brentford, Middlesex, England; Died: 30 September 2003 in London, England
- Tom Kneeboneb. 1932NZCanadian actor (1932–2003)
- Roger Kneeboneb. 1954GBBritish professor
- Ross Kneeboneb. 1956NZNew Zealand cricketer
- Rachel Kneeboneb. 1973GBEnglish artist
- Emily KneeboneGBclassical philologist
- Dave KneeboneUSAmerican producer
- Ron KneeboneAUAustralian rules footballer
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 13 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 461 | #44,027 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 453 | #46,902 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 428 | #52,367 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #349,454 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #346,627 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Kneebone mean, and where does it come from?
- Perhaps from a medieval nickname for someone with knobbly knees. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Kneebone have the most bearers?
- Kneebone is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Kneebone?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kneeboneThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Kneebone”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.