Bowring
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person who lives in a small cottage; probably from an unrecorded Old English word meaning ‘small cottage’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈboʊɹɪŋ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bowring is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- AUAustralia
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Person who lives in a small cottage; probably from an unrecorded Old English word meaning ‘small cottage’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Bowring is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from OE *būring, derivative of būr ‘bower’; earliest attestation Henry Bouryng 1302 DbCh
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Henry Bouryng 1302 DbCh; Walter Bowryng 1327 SRSo. OE *būring, a derivative of būr ‘bower’, probably synonymous with BOWRA and BOWERMAN.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- John Bowringb. 1792GB4th Governor of Hong Kong; hymnwriter; translator (1792-1872)
- Deborah Bowringb. 1816GBsuffragist and philanthropist (1816–1902)
- John Charles Bowringb. 1821Hong Kong businessman and naturalist (1821-1893)
- Lewin Bentham Bowringb. 1824British colonial administrator and writer
- Edgar Alfred Bowringb. 1826GBBritish politician and translator (1826–1911)
- Charles Calvert Bowringb. 1872GBBritish colonial administrator (1872-1945)
- Walter Armiger Bowringb. 1874NZNew Zealand artist, cartoonist and illustrator (1874–1931)
- Eva Kelly Bowringb. 1892USAmerican politician (1892-1985)
- Theodore Louis Bowringb. 1901GBcivil engineer (1901-1967)
- Jacky BowringNZNew Zealand landscape architect, contemporary, active in England
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)
Attested in 19 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 416 | #53,634 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 401 | #49,249 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 373 | #55,121 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 11 | #69,541 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 11 | #37,983 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 6 | #49,869 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 5 | #78,928 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #312,588 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 1 | #267,294 |
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 Bowring mean, and where does it come from?
- Person who lives in a small cottage; probably from an unrecorded Old English word meaning ‘small cottage’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Bowring?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈboʊɹɪŋ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Bowring have the most bearers?
- Bowring is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Bowring?
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/bowringThe 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, “Bowring”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.