Hova
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Betsileo (Madagascar): term for the middle/commoner class
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/həwvə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hova is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- FIFinland1 in 186K(measured from records)
- ESSpain≈1 in 3.3M
- DEGermany≈1 in 3.6M
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 87 (measured from records)
- 1 in 186K (inferred from the name graph)
≈78 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
Betsileo (Madagascar): term for the middle/commoner class.
Sources 1
- African Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hova 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.
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: the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register). 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)
Hova is also recorded in 5 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 member of the free commoners of Madagascar, one of the three principal historical castes there, alongside the Andriana (nobles) and Andevo (slaves).
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Hungarian, where (in which direction, which way, to which place)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In hop, a queer person, such as a homosexual or a two-spirit
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Norwegian Nynorsk, definite singular of hov
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latvian, pilsēta Lielbritānijā ("Hove"), Anglijā, piejūras kūrorts Lamanša krastā, 1977. g. apvienota ar Braitonu
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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.
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 10 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 31 | #145,687 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #35,679 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 3 | #122,554 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hova mean, and where does it come from?
- Betsileo (Madagascar): term for the middle/commoner class. Recorded by African Names.
- How do you pronounce Hova?
- A machine transcription gives /həwvə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Hova have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 78 people named Hova in the United States, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hova.
- Where is Hova most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Hova is densest in Finland — about 1 in 186 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Hova?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 31 people named Hova, about 1 in 6.8 million residents.
What do you want to know about Hova?
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/hovaThe 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, “Hova”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.