Word.ws English Dictionary

Brontë

Syllables: Bron·tëUK/ˈbɹɒn.ti/US/ˈbɹɑn.ti/

Brontë proper noun: an extinct surname from Irish, borne by a 19th-century literary family.

brontë: an extinct surname from Irish, borne by a 19th-century literary family
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Brontë (plural Brontës)

  1. An extinct surname from Irish, borne by a 19th-century literary family.
    • An 85-year injustice has been rectified at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey with the corrected spelling of one of the greatest of all literary names. Reader, it is finally Brontë, not Bronte. An amended memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë was unveiled on Thursday with added diaereses...2024 September 26, Mark Brown, “Brontë sisters finally get their dots as names corrected at Westminster Abbey”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC...
  2. A male given name transferred from the surname.

Forms of Brontë

pluralBrontës

Origin of Brontë

Used by Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) as a rendering of Brunty, Prunty, an Anglicization of the Irish Ó Proinntigh (“descendant of a person named Proinnteach (“Generous”)”), with the diaeresis over the terminal ⟨e⟩ to indicate that the name has two syllables. He first registered in 1802 at St John’s College, Cambridge, as Branty or Brunty, later Brontë, and formally changed the spelling in adult life. Multiple theories exist to account for the change, including that he may have wished to hide his humble origins. As he would have been familiar with classical Greek as a man of letters, he may have chosen the name after Ancient Greek βροντή (brontḗ, “thunder”). One view, which biographer Clement Shorter proposed in 1896, is that he adapted his name to associate himself with Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, who was also Duke of Bronte (itself also of same Greek origin).

Words formed from Brontë

Words that rhyme with Brontë

Questions about Brontë

What does Brontë mean?
Brontë means an extinct surname from Irish, borne by a 19th-century literary family.
What part of speech is Brontë?
Brontë is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Brontë?
Brontë is pronounced /ˈbɹɒn.ti/ (UK).

Words near Brontë in the dictionary

  1. brontotheres
  2. brontotherid
  3. brontotheriid
  4. brontotheriids
  5. Bronté
  6. Brontë
  7. Brontëan
  8. Brontës
  9. Brontësque
  10. Bronwen
  11. Bronwydd Arms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Brontë (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Brontë.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bront%C3%AB. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.