Sowa
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Polish: a bookish or knowledgeable person, or arising out of some fancied physical resemblance
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Sowa is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Poland than in any other country.
- PLPoland1 in 1.9K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 122K
- NONorway1 in 46K
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.
- Poland (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 117 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.9K (inferred from the name graph)
20,402 people, 2026
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Poland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
a bookish or knowledgeable person, or arising out of some fancied physical resemblance.
Sources 1
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
How Sowa is read(measured from records)
Sowa is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English52%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Sowa in English.
- Polish21%
a bookish or knowledgeable person, or arising out of some fancied physical resemblance.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
owl (strigiform bird of prey)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- German9.8%
sl. "Eule". Schobba, Vklf. Sowka, Sof(f)ke
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
from Slavic 'owl'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Sowa 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | #113 | 20,402 | 1 in 1.9K | 10K | Sowa | 117 |
| US United States | — | 2,729 | 1 in 122K | 2.8K | Sowa | 113 |
| DZ Algeria | — | ≈720 est. | ≈1 in 60K | — | Sowa | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈530 est. | ≈1 in 125K | 139 | Sowa | 49 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈360 est. | ≈1 in 291K | — | Sowa | 5 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈330 est. | ≈1 in 115K | — | Sowa | 24 |
| NO Norway | — | 120 | 1 in 46K | 120 | Sowa | 8 |
| IE Ireland | — | ≈82 est. | ≈1 in 63K | — | Sowa | 6 |
20,402 people counted by dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames), 2026. 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: dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)
Sowa 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 men, A catei'pillar that makes a portable house by gluing sticks and leaves together. Black with yellowish Ijars
as a wordMende Natural History Vocabulary
In nht, woman
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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 F. Sowab. 1940USartificial intelligence researcher
- Michael Sowab. 1945DEGerman painter, illustrator, and writer (born 1945)
- Naoe Sowab. 1945JPJapanese horse trainer (born 1945)
- Hiroshi Sowab. 1956JPJapanese association football player and manager
- Marek Sowab. 1967PLPolish politician
- Izabela Sowab. 1969PLPolish journalist
- Toshimitsu Sowab. 1971JPJapanese consultant
- Jan Sowab. 1976PLPolish sociologist, essayist, and translator
- Marzena Sowab. 1979PLComic author
- Madoka SowaJPJapanese seiyū
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 37 sources across 23 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 10K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 10K | #139 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 10K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 10K | #141 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.8K | #10,432 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.7K | #11,524 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.6K | #11,742 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 139 | #26,873 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 120 | #12,960 |
| 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 5
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
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 Sowa mean, and where does it come from?
- a bookish or knowledgeable person, or arising out of some fancied physical resemblance. Recorded by The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles.
- In which country does Sowa have the most bearers?
- In Poland, the national register counted about 20 thousand people named Sowa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sowa.
- Where is Sowa most common?
- Sowa is densest in Poland, where the national register counts about 1 in 1.9 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Sowa?
- In Poland, the national register counted 20,402 people named Sowa in 2026, about 1 in 1.9 thousand residents.
- How common is Sowa compared with other names?
- In Poland, Sowa is the 113th most common surname of 240,840 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Sowa?
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/sowaThe 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, “Sowa” — the 113th most common surname in Poland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.