Word.ws English Dictionary

Dunbar's number

Dunbar's number proper noun: a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.

Proper noun

Dunbar's number

  1. A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
    • Dunbar's number might have remained a curiosity but for the fact that subsequent research found that this number has arisen repeatedly, across the planet, in terms of actual human social group sizes.2020, Michael Wooldridge, The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI, Penguin UK, →ISBN

Forms of Dunbar's number

alternative formDunbar number

Origin of Dunbar's number

Proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.

Questions about Dunbar's number

What does Dunbar's number mean?
Dunbar's number means a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
What part of speech is Dunbar's number?
Dunbar's number is a proper noun.

Words near Dunbar's number in the dictionary

  1. Dunbabin
  2. Dunbabins
  3. Dunball
  4. Dunbar
  5. Dunbar syndrome
  6. Dunbar's number
  7. Dunbars
  8. Dunbarton
  9. Dunbartonshire
  10. Dunbible
  11. dunbird

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Dunbar's number (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Dunbar's number.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dunbar%27s_number. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.