Bowling
loc · Latin script
Meaning: From a nickname for someone with a large head or very short-cropped hair, or for a heavy drinker
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Bowling is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- KYCayman Islands≈1 in 1.5K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 12K
- GYGuyana1 in 8.8K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Bowling itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 394 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.5K (inferred from the name graph)
≈110,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Cayman Islands, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
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(measured from records)
Bowling 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Bowling | 5 |
| US United States | 26,762 | 1 in 12K | 27K | Bowling | 394 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈4,200 est. | ≈1 in 16K | listed | Bowling | 130 |
| CA Canada | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 14K | — | Bowling | 61 |
| IN India | ≈640 est. | ≈1 in 2.1M | — | Bowling | 14 |
| DK Denmark | 526as Balling | 1 in 11K | 526 | — | 2 |
| GY Guyana | 85 | 1 in 8.8K | 85 | — | 4 |
| KY Cayman Islands | ≈42 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | — | Bowling | 4 |
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; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
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(measured from records)
- 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(measured from records)
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 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #69,503 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
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 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bowling mean, and where does it come from?
- From a nickname for someone with a large head or very short-cropped hair, or for a heavy drinker. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Bowling have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 108 thousand people named Bowling in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bowling.
- How common is the name Bowling?
- In the United States, the national register counted 26,762 people named Bowling in 2010, about 1 in 12 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bowling?
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/bowlingThe 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, “Bowling”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.