Is there a heavy usage of the word “bonfire” in English?

Question

I wonder if the word "bonfire" is very often used in the English language. Maybe in different contexts than just the burning of something for fun, which is the main translation as I understood. I consider this a kind of exotic word if I think about the usage of the word in my native tongue (German).

I came across this, because I noticed that my son is now learning this word in school (sixth grade) and I remembered that I have learned the word "bonfire" in my school time (some 30 years ago) too in a somewhat early stage of learning English. This seems to indicate some basic usage or importance of this word, since it is delivered to learners on a beginner level.

It seems to me that the use of this word is rather limited and I didn't came across this word very often myself in the last 30 years. Though I have to admit that I am not using the English language very often in conversation with native speakers. I mainly use English by reading and a bit by writing, mostly in a tech context.

So I am really curious if there is something more about the "bonfire", that I have not recognized yet or if maybe there is some mysterious affection of German school publishers to this word.

As an anecdote from the past, I can tell that I found it cool that I knew the meaning of the name of the then somewhat popular German band "Bonfire" :-), but my son does not have a gain like that, since the band is maybe a little out of fashion, at least for the younger ones...

Answer 1

Bonfire is in common usage in the UK today, where it means any outdoor fire, normally built from wood or rubbish. As commenters have noted, in American and Canadian usage, a bonfire is specifically a large outdoor fire, but it's still a perfectly common word.

Some think that ‘bonfire’ is a mix of the French "bon" meaning "good" and the English Anglo-Saxon “fire”. Early believers included the British lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who offered up that etymology in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language.

Johnson defined bonfire as:

"a fire made for some publick cause of triumph or exaltation,"

He derived the word from the French bon and the English word fire - the phenomenon of combustion manifested in light, flame, and heat.

However, the etymology was changed in the 1890 Webster's International Dictionary, where it is shown as derived from Middle English bonefire, meaning literally "a fire of bones."

The earliest appearance of the word is glossed ignis ossium — Latin for "fire of bones." A citation from the 15th century confirms that this may not be just a learned folk-etymology:

But in worshipp of seinte iohan the people woke at home & made iij maner of fyres. On was clene bones & no wode & that is callid a bone fyre. A nothir is clene wode & no bones & that is callid a wode fyre fore people to sitte & to wake there by.
—John Mirk, Liber Festivalis, 1486

“But in worship of Saint John, the people woke at home and made three types of fires. One was clean bones and no wood and that is called a bonefire…”

In medieval times ‘Bonefires’ were probably common towards the end of the agricultural year, when any farmer needing to eke out their winter fodder would slaughter some of their livestock, keeping only breeding pairs with a view to replacing their stock the following spring. Having preserved the meat, rendered the fat, and treated the hides, they were left with the carcasses – the bones. These were then burnt on “bone fires” so as to convert these otherwise useless bones into potash fertiliser… This winter tradition is probably one reason a bonfire is used to celebrate Guy Fawkes' Night in the UK, on 5th November each year.

There are a few key points in favour of the "bone fire" etymology:

1. The French – English composite word idea is somewhat unusual.
2. Knowing that the word goes back to the 15th century, it is more likely to have evolved into boonfire, since boon is the English form that developed from the French bon.
3. The spelling in the word's earliest appearance is in the form banefyre, and bane is a spelling of bone which continued in common use in Scotland.

Answer 2

People who teach languages well usually try to make the subject matter interesting and pertinent to the lives and interests of the students involved. So very young learners learn the names of animals and the sounds they make, for example, because that is something that very young people are usualy interested in, not because knowing ribbet is very useful when you become an international lawyer.

Another feature of good language teaching is often felt to be to engage the learners with the interesting or colourful aspects of the culture that the language is associated with. So students of English often know terms like Big Ben or even bowler hat, even though these items are not high frequency for real speakers of English.

Lastly, teachers often try to make their lessons topical for students. So we might expect lessons about Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Independence Day and so forth at relevant times of the year. No doubt next Friday, there will be thousands of lessons about the International Day of Peace.

The reason the Original Poster's son is learning the item bonfire during the first week in November is almost definitely related to the British cultural phenomenon of Bonfire Night, where we like to celebrate the fact that the Houses of Parliament only missed getting blown up by a gnat's whisker. How do we do this? We start fires up and down the country. Oops, I mean we have bonfires.

The problem with corpora like the BNC or COCA is that they cannot have a comprehensive coverage of different registers. So, for example you will find no hits at all for revise for an exam (rampant in British English) in either of these corpuses, even though hundreds of thousands of students of various descriptions commonly use this phrase. The spoken English of students is just not sampled when putting together such corpora.

So while the word bonfire might not feature heavily in the spoken English of international bankers or American news programmes, every November it has a starring role in the social calendar of every self-respecting British youngster along with other items such as sparkler, firework and toffee apple!

Answer 3

Bonfires are actually pretty common in my experience:

• My neighborhood has one every year
• My brothers have several per year with their friends
• My friends sometimes have them at their houses

This is in the suburbs (in America), where people are close enough to easily get together and there’s also space to have a bonfire. There’s also lots of fuel for them because there’s some trees and some people also burn yard waste, planks, paper, etc.

Number-wise, I have 25 instances of the word bonfire in my messages from 19 different days across a 3 year period.

For data from a bigger (and also very different) sample, COCA puts the lemma bonfire at 2.46 instances per million words, which puts it just ahead of rhino (2.41 instances per million). And I think that almost everyone knows what “rhino” means, even if it’s not something that comes up all that often in conversation. And I would say the same is true for bonfire.

Answer 4

There are a few quick ways to gauge usage in English. The short answer is that bonfire is not all that common, but it's also used enough that most fluent speakers (especially in the US and UK) will be familiar with the term.

Oxford English Dictionary Frequency - The OED has a measure for frequency in current use for each of the words in its online dictionary. It is a scale out of 8, and its data is derived from a version of Google Ngrams ("Key to frequency"). The noun "bonfire" has a frequency of 5, which means the following:

Band 5 contains words which occur between 1 and 10 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These tend to be restricted to literate vocabulary associated with educated discourse, although such words may still be familiar within the context of that discourse. The shift away from the everyday language found in bands 8-6 is apparent in nouns (e.g. surveillance, assimilation, tumult, penchant, paraphrase, admixture), adjectives (e.g. conditional, cumulative, arithmetic, radioactive, symptomatic, authorized, Neolithic, discontinuous, preconceived, metrical), verbs (e.g. appropriate, comprehend, presuppose, perpetuate, encircle, jeopardize, subsist, gravitate, proscribe), and adverbs (e.g. markedly, empirically, functionally, disproportionately, ad hoc, exponentially, preferentially). This band also contains the most common adjectives derived from the names of philosophers and scientists (e.g. Aristotelian, Platonic, Cartesian, Newtonian, Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian). Most words which would be seen as distinctively educated, while not being abstruse, technical, or jargon, are found in this band.

About 4% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 5.

Locally, I'd say bonfire is well-known enough that it'd go in this band, and largely in contexts like church retreats, scout troop outings, and outdoor parties.

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Corpus searches in COCA and BNC - Corpuses like those at English Corpora can give valuable data about the frequency and use of a word. The Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus feature hundreds of millions of words gathered from print media, interviews, broadcasts, and other formats. So I'll present the number of appearances in each corpus, the number of total entries in the corpus, the number of appearances per million words, and then provide some qualitative comments.

1. COCA: 1091 entries among 570,353,748 words, or 1.913 appearances per 1 million words.

2. BNC: 270 entries among 96,263,399 words, or 2.80 appearances per 1 million words.

This is about the rate I would expect for searching a commonly-known but not everyday word. For example, the food word cashew appears 277 times in COCA, and the more common peanut appears 5,057 times. Meanwhile, for bonfire, the hypernym fire is far more common with 83,757 entries in COCA. So bonfire certainly isn't an obscure word, but it's also situationally specific.

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Google Ngram - Google uses the data it has from book scans to prepare data on how common words are in relation to one another. These Ngrams can be quite useful to see how common a word is. Here's one I prepared with bonfire:

The Ngram is good for showing related words with similar usage rates next to one another, and mapping trends in usage across time. For instance, we can see that bonfire, as a word, was once used more compared to the total corpus of words Google has. That might be worth investigating. Note, however, that it is easy to manipulate the Y axis by picking a word that's far more common:

Compared to fire, bonfire is a blip. So it's not like bonfire was once very common and now is less common.

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In summary, bonfire is a commonly understood word that is only occasionally used. Its appearance in your English curriculum could be explained as a teacher's or a curriculum's interest in activities around bonfires, in adding some deeper vocabulary among more common words to spice up the reading and aid language acquisition, or something else.

Answer 5

Although Wikipedia and Lexico both describe a bonfire as a "large but controlled outdoor fire", here in England a small bonfire would be lit as a way to dispose of garden refuse that could not be composted. It wasn't a party, or for fun, but a job to be done.

Every few weeks we would light a small bonfire and with careful management it would smoulder for several days. This was necessary because material like cabbage stumps will not immediately burn. The fire was started with dry stuff like hedge clippings, and when thoroughly hot it was damped down with wetter material to keep the draught out and stop it from burning too quickly.

It is less common now, but was standard practice in the days when there were no official dumps for household waste, and no "green" refuse collections, and before it became unacceptable to light open fires outdoors.

In those (mid to late 20th century) days, the word bonfire was in common use.

Answer 6

The neo-liberal politicians in New Zealand like to use the phrase "a bonfire of regulations" eg "metaphorically" disposing by burning of regulations they dislike - here "bonfire" implies a large amount.
Personally I'd rather see "a bonfire of neo-liberals", but that will never happen.

As you can see, "bonfire" can used in a metaphorical as well as literal sense.

Answer 7

Fascinating thread everyone, thank you. “Bonfire“ is still commonly used in the UK to describe an outside fire. In England, there are organised bonfires in November to celebrate Guy Fawkes night and in Northern Ireland there are many bonfires in July for different historical reasons. Interestingly, the term is often abbreviated colloquially in N Ireland to “boney” and I wonder if this is derived from the old practice of burning old bones for potash, as described by another contributor above.