Bristow
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Bristol, originally Bristow; from a place name meaning 'assembly place by the bridge'
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Bristow is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- VAVatican City
- FIFinland
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.
- United States (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 378 (measured from records)
no count published
Highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Person from Bristol, originally Bristow; from a place name meaning 'assembly place by the bridge'.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bristow counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 7.3K | Bristow | 378 |
| VA Vatican City | — | — | Bristow | 3 |
| FI Finland | — | 30 | Bristow | 1 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | listed | Bristow | 207 |
| DE Germany | — | — | Bristow | 30 |
| ES Spain | — | 55 | — | 33 |
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; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal). 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)
Bristow 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 Bristol, Gloucestershire; first attested Lia de Bristou 1191 P (Gl)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, so called from OE brycg Bridge + stow assembly place. The final -l of the modern form is due to a regional pronun¬ ciation. Vars.: Bristowe, Bristo(e), Brister.
as a nameA dictionary of 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)
- Benjamin Helm Bristowb. 1832USUnion Army officer, lawyer, politician (1832-1896)
- Joseph L. Bristowb. 1861USAmerican politician (1861-1944)
- Henry Stallardb. 1901GBnot in their usual nameBritish athlete (1901–1973)
- Gwen Bristowb. 1903USAmerican author and journalist
- Thomas Bristowb. 1913GBBritish rower (1913–2007)
- Chris Bristowb. 1937GBracecar driver
- Deem Bristowb. 1947USAmerican actor (1947-2005)
- Allan Bristowb. 1951USAmerican basketball player, coach, executive
- Eric Bristowb. 1957GBEnglish darts player (1957–2018)
- Patrick Bristowb. 1962USAmerican actor and comedian
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 25 sources across 15 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.3K | #4,819 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 7.1K | #4,563 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6.8K | #4,995 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 55 | #42,033 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 55 | #41,513 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #34,844 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| 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
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Bristow mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Bristol, originally Bristow; from a place name meaning 'assembly place by the bridge'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Bristow have the most bearers?
- Bristow is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled bristow.
What do you want to know about Bristow?
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/bristowThe 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, “Bristow”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.