Tove
given name · Danish · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Tove is a given name, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country, where it is the 79th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Danish and Norwegian Bokmål, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Tove är en dansk form av → Tova.
- NONorway1 in 413◐
- DKDenmark1 in 514
- SESweden1 in 1.2K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈35K ●
- Sources
- 126 ●
- 1 in 413 ◐
across 8 countries
21K records
Official registry-verified
Norway
Meaning & origin●
Tove är en dansk form av → Tova. Kända namnbärare är den danska författaren Tove Ditlevsen (1917–76) och den finlandssvenska Tove Jansson (1914–2001). I den rikssvenska almanackan 5 mars och i den finlandssvenska 12 december. Även ett mansnamn Tove har förekommit, särskilt i Sydsverige. Det var ursprungligen en smekform till namn som → Torvald.
Sources 1
- Förnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
Attested across 4 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 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO Norway | #79 | 13,236△ | 6.2K rec. | 1 in 413 | 41K | Tove | 87 |
| DK Denmark | #125 | 11,412△ | 1.7K rec. | 1 in 514 | 11K | Tove | 89 |
| SE Sweden | #170 | 8,534 | 6.2K rec. | 1 in 1.2K | 8.5K | Tove | 70 |
| FI Finland | — | 890△ | 172 rec. | 1 in 6.3K | 1K | Tove | 15 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 490 | 402 rec. | — | listed | Tove | 48 |
| US United States | — | 469 | 4.5K rec. | 1 in 709K | 469 | Tove | 126 |
| DE Germany | — | 313 | 258 rec. | — | 2 | Tove | 45 |
| AU Australia | — | 284 | 258 rec. | — | 1 | Tove | 40 |
| CA Canada | — | 165 | 151 rec. | — | 1 | Tove | 25 |
| BR Brazil | — | 92 | 55 rec. | — | — | Tove | 17 |
| AR Argentina | — | 88 | 101 rec. | — | — | Tove | 14 |
| TR Türkiye | — | 67 | 95 rec. | — | — | Tove | 6 |
Roughly 13K people in Norway bear this name (about 1 in 413). 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●
- Danish50K41%
- Norwegian Bokmål41K34%
- Norwegian9.6K8%
- English5.3K4%
- Finnish4.7K4%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Danish | 49,804 | 41% |
| Norwegian Bokmål | 41,016 | 34% |
| Norwegian | 9,613 | 8% |
| English | 5,343 | 4% |
| Finnish | 4,682 | 4% |
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●
Tove 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.
1 (f.) Danish and Norwegian: from the Old Norse female personal name Tófa , a short form of orfríðr (see TURID ). 2 (m.) Swedish: short form, used as early as the Viking period, of TORVALD . Variant (of 2): Tuve . Top
as a word
In men, very. LIwaanya gbéla tove
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
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.
Over time●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 1945 | 350 |
| 1946 | 365 |
| 1947 | 361 |
| 1948 | 358 |
| 1949 | 322 |
| 1950 | 375 |
| 1951 | 355 |
| 1952 | 436 |
| 1953 | 447 |
| 1954 | 511 |
| 1955 | 516 |
| 1956 | 540 |
| 1957 | 590 |
| 1958 | 520 |
| 1959 | 505 |
| 1960 | 509 |
| 1961 | 522 |
| 1962 | 513 |
| 1963 | 461 |
| 1964 | 514 |
| 1965 | 543 |
| 1966 | 427 |
| 1967 | 420 |
| 1968 | 418 |
| 1969 | 394 |
| 1970 | 296 |
| 1971 | 294 |
| 1972 | 255 |
| 1973 | 192 |
| 1974 | 177 |
| 1975 | 163 |
| 1976 | 123 |
| 1977 | 114 |
| 1978 | 84 |
| 1979 | 94 |
| 1980 | 82 |
| 1981 | 54 |
| 1982 | 54 |
| 1983 | 53 |
| 1984 | 50 |
| 1985 | 32 |
| 1986 | 36 |
| 1987 | 29 |
| 1988 | 26 |
| 1989 | 31 |
| 1990 | 28 |
| 1991 | 18 |
| 1992 | 17 |
| 1993 | 18 |
| 1994 | 12 |
| 1995 | 11 |
| 1996 | 9 |
| 1997 | 8 |
| 1998 | 5 |
| 1999 | 11 |
| 2000 | 5 |
| 2001 | 9 |
| 2003 | 4 |
| 2004 | 4 |
| 2005 | 14 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2010 | 4 |
| 2012 | 5 |
| 2016 | 5 |
| 2017 | 5 |
| 2023 | 5 |
| 2025 | 5 |
NO SSB — Navn (1880–present) — 67 years between 1945–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Tove Janssonb. 1914FIFinnish children's writer and illustrator (1914–2001)
- Tove Ditlevsenb. 1917DKDanish poet and author (1917–1976)
- Ragnhild Hvegerb. 1920DKnot in their usual nameDanish swimmer (1920-2011)
- Tove Nilsenb. 1952NONorwegian author
- Tove Christensenb. 1973CACanadian actor and producer
- Tove Edfeldtb. 1983SESwedish actress
- Tove Lob. 1987SESwedish singer
- Tove Styrkeb. 1992SESwedish singer and songwriter
- Tove Alexanderssonb. 1992SESwedish female orienteer and ski orienteer
- Tove Enblomb. 1994SESwedish association football player (born 1994)
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 36 sources across 20 countries.
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name 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 2026-09-12 data build · 253 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Tove?
- We estimate roughly 35 thousand people bear Tove (counting its spellings and scripts) across 8 countries in our records.
- In which country does Tove have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 13 thousand people bear Tove in Norway, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled tove.
- Where is Tove most common?
- Tove is densest in Norway, where the national register counts about 1 in 413 people carrying it.
- How common is Tove compared with other names?
- In Norway, Tove is the 79th most common given name of 38,312 given names recorded there.
- Is Tove a male or female name?
- Tove is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What does the name Tove mean?
- Recorded meaning: Tove är en dansk form av → Tova.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/toveThe 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, “Tove” — the 79th most common given name in Norway. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.