Bovey
loc · Latin script
Meaning: ‘person from Bovey’, Devon, named from the river Bovey of unknown meaning
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 7 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
Bovey is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- MNMongolia
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 Bovey’, Devon, named from the river Bovey of unknown meaning.
Cited for this meaning 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)Bovey 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 English, from an early form Boue/Bouy; first attested Walter Boue 1185 Templars (L)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Walter Boue 1185 Templars (L); William Bouy 1219 AssY; Richard Bovle 1642 PrD. 393 ON Bófi, ODa Bovi, OSw Bove.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
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)- Henry Boveyb. 1852GBBritish engineer (1852–1912)
- Paul Boveyb. 1905CHSwiss entomologist and university lecturer (1905–1990)
- Pierre-André Boveyb. 1942CHSwiss composer
- Patricia Boveyb. 1948CACanadian politician
- Mungo Boveyb. 1959GBBritish lawyer
- Grant Boveyb. 1961GBBritish businesspeople
- Muriel BoveyCHSwiss latinist and teacher
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)13 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 436 | #2,989 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 430 | #48,995 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 424 | #47,120 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 420 | #53,213 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1921 | 11 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1951 | 6 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1931 | 6 | — |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 5 | #64,821 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1901 | 5 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1911 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
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 Bovey mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘person from Bovey’, Devon, named from the river Bovey of unknown meaning. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Bovey have the most bearers?
- Bovey is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Bovey?
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/boveyThe 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, “Bovey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.