Bowling
loc · English · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Bowling is a name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. It appears chiefly in English and Finnish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From a nickname for someone with a large head or very short-cropped hair, or for a heavy drinker.
- KYCayman Islands1 in 97◐
- USUnited States1 in 12K
- MOMacao1 in 4.7K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈28K ●
- 2 ●
- Sources
- 350 ●
- 1 in 8.8K ◐
across 13 countries
recorded for this name
205K records
Official registry-verified
Guyana
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Bolling in KR South Korea.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin●
From a nickname for someone with a large head or very short-cropped hair, or for a heavy drinker.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 26,762 | 173K rec. | 1 in 12K | 27K | Bowling | 350 |
| KY Cayman Islands | 1,181 | 55 rec. | — | — | Bowling | 4 |
| GB United Kingdom | 889 | 10K rec. | — | listed | Bowling | 99 |
| DK Denmark | 526△ | 8 rec. | 1 in 11K | 526 | — | 4 |
| SE Sweden | 257△ | 46 rec. | 1 in 40K | 257 | — | 9 |
| MO Macao | 106 | 13 rec. | — | — | Bowling | 3 |
| GY Guyana | 85 | 111 rec. | 1 in 8.8K | 85 | — | 5 |
| CN China | 56 | 447 rec. | — | — | Bowling | 5 |
| RU Russia | 52 | 545 rec. | — | — | Bowling | 12 |
| NL Netherlands | 38 | 55 rec. | 1 in 455K | 38 | — | 8 |
| NO Norway | 28 | 17 rec. | 1 in 195K | 28 | — | 5 |
| CA Canada | 21 | 5K rec. | — | — | Bowling | 44 |
Roughly 27K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 12K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- English1.2M76%
- Finnish2571%
- Chinese1621%
- Spanish501%
- Italian431%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| English | 1,162,977 | 76% |
| Finnish | 257 | 1% |
| Chinese | 162 | 1% |
| Spanish | 50 | 1% |
| Italian | 43 | 1% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Bowling 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, present participle and gerund of bowl
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Swedish, bowling; a game played by rolling a ball down an alley
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Portuguese, alternative spelling of bólingue
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Italian, ten-pin bowling
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Spanish, bowling alley
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●
- William B. Bowlingb. 1870USAmerican politician (1870–1946)
- Frank Bowlingb. 1936GBBritish painter
- Roger Bowlingb. 1944USAmerican musician (1944-1982)
- Ann Patricia Bowlingb. 1951GBBritish and Irish sociologist
- Katherine Bowlingb. 1955USAmerican painter (born 1955)
- Ian Bowlingb. 1965GBEnglish footballer (born 1965)
- Victoria "Porkchop" Parkerb. 1969USnot in their usual nameAmerican drag queen and actor
- Anthony Bowlingb. 1982USAmerican actor
- Kansas Bowlingb. 1996USAmerican filmmaker and actress
- Parker Love Bowlingb. 1999USAmerican actress
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).
Evidence●
Attested in 13 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 27K | #1,311 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 26K | #1,243 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 25K | #1,384 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 85 | #540 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 14 | #49,352 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 14 | #101,339 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 6 | #52,369 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #71,525 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #312,781 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames (Census 2010 + voter-file supplement) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 2026-09-12 data build · 11 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Bowling?
- We estimate roughly 28 thousand people bear Bowling (counting its spellings and scripts) across 13 countries in our records.
- In which country does Bowling have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 27 thousand people bear Bowling in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled bowling.
- What does the name Bowling mean?
- Recorded meaning: From a nickname for someone with a large head or very short-cropped hair, or for a heavy drinker.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/bowlingThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.
About this data
Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.
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, “Bowling”. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.