# Bonin

> English word · Proper noun · frequency rank #75,669

## Definitions
1. An archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean, part of the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Arc administered as Ogasawara (a subprefecture of Tokyo prefecture, Japan).

## Etymology
From French Bonin in an 1817 monograph on the islands by the French scholar Rémusat, misunderstanding Japanese 無人島 (mujintō, “desert island”) as a proper name for the Ogasawaras, misreading the kanji as the related pronunciation buninjima, and then mistranscribing the vowel into French.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/bonin