How
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Either from a place-name Howe/Old Norse haugr “small hill”, or a different form of Hugh (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 15 countries · latest register: BFS, 2024
/how/(machine-generated) Malay · model-generated · uncertain
How is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 789 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- NONorway1 in 70K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 422K
- SESweden1 in 464K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 233 (measured from records)
- 1 in 70K (inferred from the name graph)
789 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce How
- Malay:/how/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Either from a place-name Howe/Old Norse haugr “small hill”, or a different form of Hugh.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname How is found
(measured from records)How 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 | — | 789 | 1 in 422K | 891 | How | 233 |
| NO Norway | — | 78 | 1 in 70K | 78 | — | 9 |
| BR Brazil | — | 27 | 1 in 7.8M | 27 | — | 1 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 25 | 1 in 691K | 25 | How | 18 |
| SE Sweden | — | 22 | 1 in 464K | 22 | — | 9 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 12 | 1 in 700K | 12 | — | 10 |
| SG Singapore | #455 | — | — | — | How | 113 |
789 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); 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).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)How is also recorded in 5 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 hōh ‘heel; projecting ridge of land’, or sometimes ON haugr ‘mound, hill’; first attested William de Ho 1121–48 Bury (Essex)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, To what degree or extent.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, ayé, ye; how
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In yol, alternative form of fowe
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In dsb, here
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)- Henry Howb. 1828CACanadian chemist (1828–1879)
- Walter Howb. 1885GBBritish sailor
- Foon Chew Howb. 1908CNChinese botanist (1908-1959)
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)27 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 15 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name How mean, and where does it come from?
- Either from a place-name Howe/Old Norse haugr “small hill”, or a different form of Hugh. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce How?
- In Malay /how/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname How?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 789 people named How, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled how. After it come Norway, Brazil, Netherlands and Sweden; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is How most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, How is densest in Norway — about 1 in 70 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name How?
- In the United States, the national register counted 789 people named How in 2010, about 1 in 422 thousand residents.
- How common is How compared with other names?
- In Singapore, How is the 455th most common surname of 78,292 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about How?
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/howThe 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, “How” — ranked 28469th in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.