Cowper
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) 'person from Coupar', Fife (perhaps 'community'); (ii) see Constantine
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/kaʊpəɹ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Cowper is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- AUAustralia
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
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)
(i) 'person from Coupar', Fife (perhaps 'community'); (ii) see Constantine.
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)
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)
Cowper 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 French, Edward-Alfred Cowper (1819-1893), ingénieur, mécanicien et métallurgiste anglais, déposa en 1857 un brevet relatif à l’invention d’un appareil utilisé en métallurgie pour récupérer les gaz des hauts-fourneaux. Ce procédé, qui, depuis, porte son nom, fut déterminant en transformant les anciens procédés métallurgiques.
as a name2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)
In English, William, English poet
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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 Cowper, 1st Earl Cowperb. 1665GBEnglish noble, politician and first Lord Chancellor of Great Britain (1665-1723)
- William Cowperb. 1731GBEnglish poet and hymnodist (1731–1800)
- William Cowper-Temple, 1st Baron Mount Templeb. 1811GBBritish noble and politician (1811-1888)
- Frances Jocelyn, Viscountess Jocelynb. 1820GBnot in their usual nameBritish viscountess (1820–1880)
- Francis Cowper, 7th Earl Cowperb. 1834GBBritish Earl and politician (1834–1905)
- Frank Cadogan Cowperb. 1877GBBritish artist (1877-1958)
- John Middleton Murry, Jr.b. 1926GBnot in their usual nameEnglish writer (1926–2002)
- Steve Cowperb. 1938USGovernor of Alaska from 1986 to 1990
- Gerry Cowperb. 1958GBBritish actress
- Nicola Cowperb. 1967GBBritish 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 15 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 630 | #35,671 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 614 | #38,781 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 576 | #36,630 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 39 | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 11 | #114,632 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #217,240 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 3 | #154,370 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #255,997 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #197,822 |
| 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 Cowper mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) 'person from Coupar', Fife (perhaps 'community'); (ii) see Constantine. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Cowper?
- A machine transcription gives /kaʊpəɹ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Cowper have the most bearers?
- Cowper is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Cowper?
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/cowperThe 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, “Cowper”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.