Bolter
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Roger le Buleter, le Buletor, le Bolter 1246, 1248, 1253 Oseney (O); Roger le Boletere 1261 Oriel (O); Geoffrey le Bolter 1276 RH (Berks)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈboʊɫtɝ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bolter is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- DEGermany≈1 in 102K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 203K
- USUnited States1 in 168Kas Boelter
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 Bolter 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)
- Sources
- 222 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 32K (inferred from the name graph)
≈5,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Liechtenstein, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Boelter in US United States, NZ New Zealand, FI Finland and Bölter in DE Germany.
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)
Roger le Buleter, le Buletor, le Bolter 1246, 1248, 1253 Oseney (O); Roger le Boletere 1261 Oriel (O); Geoffrey le Bolter 1276 RH (Berks). OFr buleteor ‘a sifter of meal’. Bolter, which is the most common form, is probably often a derivative of OE bolt, ‘a maker of bolts’. cf. BOLT.
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bolter 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 | ≈5,000 est. | ≈1 in 277K | — | Bolter | 2 |
| US United States | 1,976as Boelter | 1 in 168K | 2K | Boelter | 222 |
| DE Germany | ≈790 est. | ≈1 in 102K | — | Bölter | 69 |
| BR Brazil | 656as Boelter | 1 in 323K | 656 | — | 2 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈320 est. | ≈1 in 203K | listed | Bolter | 88 |
| AT Austria | ≈240 est. | ≈1 in 37K | — | Bolter | 25 |
| FI Finland | ≈82 est. | ≈1 in 68K | — | Boelter | 1 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈78 est. | ≈1 in 63K | — | Boelter | 13 |
| CH Switzerland | 57 | 1 in 147K | 57 | Bolter | 9 |
| LI Liechtenstein | ≈1 est. | ≈1 in 32K | 6 | — | 3 |
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; the reaney-english-surnames-1991 register; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Statistik Liechtenstein — Familiennamenstatistik (surnames). 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)
Bolter 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, A person or thing that bolts, or runs suddenly.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Different forms of Bolt (i-ii).
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
In English, from OFr buleteor ‘a sifter of meal’; first attested Roger le Buleter 1246 Oseney (O)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In Norwegian Bokmål, indefinite plural of bolt
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)
- Andreas Aloysius Bolterb. 1820DEAmerican businessman and insect collector
- Leif Bolterb. 1941SESwedish artist
- Jay David Bolterb. 1951USAmerican academic
- Mario Bolterb. 1984ATAustrian association football player
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 13 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 597 | #35,621 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 583 | #40,492 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 563 | #39,117 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 57 | #16,859 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 45 | #112,812 |
| LI Liechtenstein | Statistik Liechtenstein — Familiennamenstatistik (surnames) | 2020 | 6 | — |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- Where does the name Bolter come from?
- Roger le Buleter, le Buletor, le Bolter 1246, 1248, 1253 Oseney (O); Roger le Boletere 1261 Oriel (O); Geoffrey le Bolter 1276 RH (Berks). OFr buleteor ‘a sifter of meal’. Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Bolter?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈboʊɫtɝ/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Bolter mean?
- Recorded meaning: Roger le Buleter, le Buletor, le Bolter 1246, 1248, 1253 Oseney (O); Roger le Boletere 1261 Oriel (O); Geoffrey le Bolter 1276 RH (Berks).
- In which country does Bolter have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 5.0 thousand people named Bolter in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bolter.
- How common is the name Bolter?
- In Switzerland, the national register counted 57 people named Bolter in 2024, about 1 in 147 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bolter?
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/bolterThe 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, “Bolter”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.