Thornes
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/θɔɹnz/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Thornes is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Main GB Location (1881): WR Yorks. see Thorns .
- USUnited States1 in 897K(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 25K
- GHGhana≈1 in 90K
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 States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 146 (measured from records)
- 1 in 25K (inferred from the name graph)
371 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Main GB Location (1881): WR Yorks. see Thorns .
Sources 1
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
Where in the world(measured from records)
Thornes 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 371 | 1 in 897K | 371 | Thornes | 146 |
| GH Ghana | ≈330 est. | ≈1 in 90K | — | Thornes | 4 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 293K | 299 | Thornes | 76 |
| NO Norway | 218 | 1 in 25K | 218 | Thornes | 13 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈31 est. | ≈1 in 1.8M | — | Thornes | 6 |
| FI Finland | 11 | 1 in 507K | 11 | Thornes | 1 |
| IE Ireland | ≈6 est. | ≈1 in 856K | — | Thornes | 15 |
371 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)
Thornes 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 enm, plural of thorn
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)
- Hermann Thornesb. 1891NONorwegian politician
- John Barrie Thornesb. 1940GBgeographer and geomorphologist
- Sverre Thornesb. 1960NONorwegian businessman
- Mats Thornesb. 2002NONorwegian association football player
- Richard ThornesEnglish Member of Parliament
- Robert ThornesEnglish Member of Parliament
- Roger ThornesEnglish Member of Parliament
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 14 sources across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 371 | #55,386 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 367 | #59,512 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 356 | #54,269 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 299 | #16,417 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 218 | #7,203 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 11 | #44,222 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Thornes mean, and where does it come from?
- Main GB Location (1881): WR Yorks. see Thorns . Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland.
- How do you pronounce Thornes?
- A machine transcription gives /θɔɹnz/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Thornes have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 371 people named Thornes, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled thornes.
- Where is Thornes most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Thornes is densest in Norway — about 1 in 25 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Thornes?
- In the United States, the national register counted 371 people named Thornes in 2010, about 1 in 897 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Thornes?
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/thornesThe 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, “Thornes”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.