Howland
surname · Latin script
Meaning: 2. Americanized form of Norwegian Hovland
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/hawlənd/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Howland is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- 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)
2. Americanized form of Norwegian Hovland. IJ»1:I=I4JJ:H Howland was the name of three Quaker brothers, original settlers in Marshfield, MA. They were from Huntingdonshire, England. The eldest, John Howland (c. 1593-1672) was a passenger on the Mayflower, servant to Governor John Carver, who died in the first winter at Plymouth Colony.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
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)
Howland 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, different form of Holland (i)
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
In English, Island, Pacific Ocean
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)
- John Howlandb. 1591GBPassenger on the Mayflower
- William Pearce Howlandb. 1811CAFather of Confederation of Canada, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario (1811-1907)
- Oliver Aiken Howlandb. 1847CACanadian politician (1847–1905)
- Jobyna Howlandb. 1880USAmerican actress (1880-1936)
- Olin Howlandb. 1886USAmerican actor (1886–1959)
- Chris Howlandb. 1928GBBritish broadcaster (1928-2013)
- Anne H. Ehrlichb. 1933USnot in their usual nameAmerican conservation biologist
- Beth Howlandb. 1941USAmerican musical theatre and television actress (1941–2015)
- Ben Howlandb. 1957USAmerican basketball coach (born 1957)
- Rick HowlandCACanadian actor
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 17 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 8.7K | #4,092 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 8.7K | #3,760 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 8.2K | #4,186 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 8 | #134,434 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 6 | #72,468 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #222,766 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #160,365 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 2018 | 1 | — |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | — | 1 | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
- Where does the name Howland come from?
- 2. Americanized form of Norwegian Hovland. IJ»1:I=I4JJ:H Howland was the name of three Quaker brothers, original settlers in Marshfield, MA. They were from Huntingdonshire, England. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Howland?
- A machine transcription gives /hawlənd/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Howland mean?
- Recorded meaning: 2. Americanized form of Norwegian Hovland.
- In which country does Howland have the most bearers?
- Howland is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Howland?
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/howlandThe 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, “Howland”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.