Harlow
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Harlow’, a place name meaning either ‘mound associated with an army’ or ‘rocky hill’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/hɑɹlow/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Harlow is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- CACanada
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘Person from Harlow’, a place name meaning either ‘mound associated with an army’ or ‘rocky hill’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Harlow is also recorded in 4 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 Harlow (Essex) or Harlow Hill (Northumberland, West Riding of Yorkshire); first attested Osbern, Thomas de Herlaue 1121–8 Bury, 1205 Pl (Herts)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, places so called. One in W Yorks, probably gets its name from OE hcer rock, heap of stones + hldw hill (see Law 2 and Low i); those in Essex and Northumb. have here army as the first element, perhaps in the sense ‘host’, ‘as¬ sembly’. Harran see Heron
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, 1. habitational name from any of various places called Harlow. One in West Yorkshire is probably named from Old English hcer ‘rock’, ‘heap of stones’ + hldw ‘mound’, ‘hill’; those in Essex and Northumberland have Old English here ‘army’ as the first element, perhaps in the sense ‘host’, ‘assembly’. 2. There is also a record of this name as a variant of Cornish Penhollow.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Collina rocciosa
as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…
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)
- George Henry Harlowb. 1787GBBritish artist (1787-1819)
- Harry Frederick Harlowb. 1905USAmerican psychologist (1905–1981)
- Jean Harlowb. 1911USAmerican film actress (1911–1937)
- Honey Harlowb. 1927USAmerican exotic dancer (1927–2005)
- Larry Harlowb. 1939USAmerican musician (1939–2021)
- Shalom Harlowb. 1973CACanadian model and actress
- Kristi Mystb. 1973USnot in their usual nameAmerican pornographic actress
- Poppy Harlowb. 1982USAmerican journalist
- Eve Harlowb. 1989RUUSSR-born Canadian actress
- Winnie Harlowb. 1994CAJamaican-Canadian fashion model
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)
Attested in 40 sources across 20 countries.
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Harlow mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Harlow’, a place name meaning either ‘mound associated with an army’ or ‘rocky hill’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Harlow have the most bearers?
- Harlow is most frequently recorded in the United States.
- How do you pronounce Harlow?
- A machine transcription gives /hɑɹlow/ (IPA) for English.
What do you want to know about Harlow?
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/harlowThe 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, “Harlow”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.