Mowat

surname · Latin script

Meaning: (i) Official in charge of communal pasturage, from Middle English moward ‘meadow guardian’

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

/ˈmoʊət/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Mowat is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • CACanada
  • AUAustralia

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.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

(i) Official in charge of communal pasturage, from Middle English moward ‘meadow guardian’. (ii) From medieval female name Mohaut, variant of Mahalt. (iii) Person from Monthaut/Monhaut in northern France, ‘high hill’.

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)

Mowat is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, From Norman Montealto, from Old French mont hault ‘big hill’; Robert de Montealto settled in Scotland in the 12th century, later recorded as de Muhaut.

    as a nameScottish 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)

1700180019002000Henry Mowat, b. 1734Oliver Mowat, b. 1820Oliver Mowat Biggar, b. 1876John Mowat, b. 1908Charles Loch Mowat, b. 1911Farley Mowat, b. 1921Doug Mowat, b. 1929Claire Mowat, b. 1933Alicia Brandet, b. 1943David Mowat, b. 1957

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)

FormalDear Mowat,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 17 sources across 8 countries.

Official registers attesting Mowat
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010516#42,094
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020488#46,955
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000483#42,289
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—9#126,713
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)20248#72,019
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20264—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—4#231,044
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20262—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—2#363,361
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)20081#178,510
CZ CzechiaMVČR — living population register 2017—1#285,171
GB United KingdomScottish Surnames (Ross, 1994)———

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 Mowat come from?
(i) Official in charge of communal pasturage, from Middle English moward ‘meadow guardian’. (ii) From medieval female name Mohaut, variant of Mahalt. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Mowat?
A machine transcription gives /ˈmoʊət/ (IPA) for English.
What does the name Mowat mean?
Recorded meaning: (i) Official in charge of communal pasturage, from Middle English moward ‘meadow guardian’.
In which country does Mowat have the most bearers?
Mowat is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Mowat?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mowat

The 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, “Mowat”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Mowat parses inside a full name →