Bō
given name · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Bō is a given name used for both men and women, written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Sweden than in any other country: 84,009 people, counted by Skatteverket, which ranks it 34th. Recorded meaning: From Old Norse búa, from Proto-Germanic *būaną.
- SESweden1 in 121(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 546
- FIFinland1 in 3.5K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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.
- Sweden (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 96 (measured from records)
- 1 in 121 (inferred from the name graph)
84,009 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Sweden
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Bo in SE Sweden, US United States, BH Bahrain.
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)- Old Norsebúa(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*būaną(measured from records)
From Old Norse búa, from Proto-Germanic *būaną.
Cited for this meaning 10
- A concise dictionary of first names
- Dizionario dei cognomi italiani
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
- Wiktionary
Attested across 33 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bō 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.
84,009 people counted by Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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: Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)Bō 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 Japanese, Rōmaji transcription of ぼう
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin reading of 剚
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)- Wang Bob. 1970CNChinese association football manager
- Zheng Bob. 1983CNChinese badminton player
- Zhang Bob. 1985CNChinese footballer
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
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bō mean, and where does it come from?
- From Old Norse búa, from Proto-Germanic *būaną. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and Dizionario dei cognomi italiani and 8 other sources.
- Is Bō a male or female name?
- Bō is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- Which countries have the most people named Bō?
- In Sweden, the national register counted about 84 thousand people named Bō, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bo. After it come United States, Denmark, Finland and Norway; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Bō most common?
- Bō is densest in Sweden, where the national register counts about 1 in 121 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Bō?
- In Sweden, the national register counted 84,009 people named Bō, about 1 in 121 residents.
- How common is Bō compared with other names?
- In Bahrain, Bō is the 117th most common given name of 6,583 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bō?
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/b%C5%8DThe 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, “Bō” — ranked 34th in Sweden (Skatteverket). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.