Bowe
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Obsolete spelling of bow
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 17 countries · latest register: BFS, 2024
/bow/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bowe is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In the Bahamas it is the 14th most common surname.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 32K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 35K
- USUnited States1 in 50K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Bowe itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 351 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 5.0K (inferred from the name graph)
6,628 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Bahamas, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Boewe in CD Congo - Kinshasa.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Obsolete spelling of bow.
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bowe counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 6,628 | 1 in 50K | 6.6K | Bowe | 351 |
| ES Spain | — | 4,587as Bou | 1 in 11K | 4.6K | — | 17 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 35K | listed | Bowe | 150 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈1,400 est. | ≈1 in 187K | — | Bowe | 14 |
| CD Congo - Kinshasa | — | ≈1,400 est. | ≈1 in 72K | — | Boewe | 1 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈800 est. | ≈1 in 32K | 1 | Bowe | 117 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 436as Bovey | 1 in 19K | 436 | Bowe | 4 |
| IE Ireland | #970 | ≈400 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Bowe | 77 |
| BS Bahamas | #14 | ≈68 est. | ≈1 in 5K | — | Bowe | 58 |
6,628 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- John Boweb. 1911AUAustralian rules footballer (1911-1990)
- Rosemarie Boweb. 1932USAmerican actress (1932-2019)
- John Boweb. 1950GBBritish actor
- David Boweb. 1955GBBritish politician (born 1955)
- David Boweb. 1964USAmerican actor
- John Boweb. 1964USAmerican writer
- Riddick Boweb. 1967USAmerican boxer (born 1967)
- Tommy Boweb. 1984GBRugby union player and television presenter from Ireland
- Aisha Boweb. 1986USBahamian-American aerospace engineer
- Brittany Boweb. 1988USAmerican speed skater
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)32 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 6.6K | #5,264 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6.6K | #5,142 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6.5K | #4,957 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 21 | #82,830 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 21 | #80,648 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bowe mean, and where does it come from?
- Obsolete spelling of bow. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Bowe?
- A machine transcription gives /bow/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Bowe have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 6.6 thousand people named Bowe, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bowe.
- How common is the name Bowe?
- In the United States, the national register counted 6,628 people named Bowe in 2010, about 1 in 50 thousand residents.
- How common is Bowe compared with other names?
- In the Bahamas, Bowe is the 14th most common surname of 3,175 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bowe?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/boweThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Bowe” — the 14th most common surname in Bahamas. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.