Bonawentura
Fewer than a hundred people in Poland carry it, so most Poles have never met a Bonawentura. From Latin for "good fortune", and used almost evenly for boys and girls.
Bonawentura Pronunciation
Bonawentura is pronounced bo-nah-ven-TOO-rah (/bɔnavɛnˈtura/).
What Bonawentura means
Where Bonawentura comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Bonawentura is built from Latin. Two pieces sit inside it: bonus, meaning good, and ventura, the things that are coming. Read together they mean good fortune, in Polish dobry los. The Romans used the phrase bene venturus for something that arrives well, and the name grew from that root.
The best documented bearer is Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, a Franciscan theologian of the thirteenth century, later canonized. The Church keeps his feast, and the Polish imieniny, on 15 July. It has no common diminutive and no feminine pair, so it stays in its full, four-syllable form. On a school register those syllables run long, and a teacher learns to say them once and then remembers.
The meaning is plain. A child given this name is handed the sense of good fortune, dobry los, spelled with the Polish w where Latin wrote the v.
When Bonawentura celebrates name day
Bonawentura appears 5 times in the Polish name day calendar, 1 of them as a main name, the first on 15 July.
The days Polish calendars list this name on. By custom you celebrate one of them, usually the first after your birthday.
Rarer dates. Only the most complete calendars add this name on these days. Most skip them, so hardly anyone celebrates then.
How many people are named Bonawentura
1 in 609891 men in Poland is named Bonawentura. 61 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #4693 among male names.
Bonawentura as a middle name
Bonawentura is a first name for 61 men in Poland and a middle name for another 330, a 16/84 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 384th, between Makary (336) and Jarema (330).
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#382 Wawrzyn337
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#383 Makary336
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#384 Bonawentura330
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#385 Jarema330
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#386 Klaus330