Unwin

surname · Latin script

Meaning: from the Old English male personal name Hunwine, literally 'bearcub-friend' (later confused with unwine 'enemy')

(measured from records)Officially recorded in 10 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026

Pronunciation:Explore pronunciation →

Unwin is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.

  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • AUAustralia
  • NZNew Zealand

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)

from the Old English male personal name Hunwine, literally 'bearcub-friend' (later confused with unwine 'enemy')

Cited for this meaning 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

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)

Unwin is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, from OE Hūnwine ‘young bear-friend’, or OE unwine ‘unfriend, enemy’; first attested Hunuuinus, Onouuinus 1066 DB (C, Do)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, composed of the elements hun bearcub + wine friend.

    as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles

  • In English, A surname from Old English.

    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)
1850190019502000Raymond Unwin, b. 1863Stanley Unwin, b. 1884David Unwin, b. 1959
  • Raymond Unwinb. 1863GBBritish engineer, architect and town planner (1863–1940)
  • Stanley Unwinb. 1884GBBritish publisher (1884-1968): George Allen & Unwin; Allen and Unwin
  • David Unwinb. 1959GBBritish paleontologist

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 Unwin,
InformalHello,

Evidence

(measured from records)

20 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 10 countries.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Unwin mean, and where does it come from?
from the Old English male personal name Hunwine, literally 'bearcub-friend' (later confused with unwine 'enemy') Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Unwin have the most bearers?
Unwin is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.

What do you want to know about Unwin?

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

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, “Unwin”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Unwin parses inside a full name →