EnglishPlace name2 syllables
Meaning: Wine's hill.
Winslow
A friend called Wine was buried on a hill in Buckinghamshire twelve hundred years ago, and the whole later history of the name — Mayflower governor, marine painter, Arizona street corner — descends from that.
| Origin | English — a market town in Buckinghamshire, then a surname, then a given name in colonial New England |
|---|---|
| Meaning | The Old English personal name Wine, friend, + hlāw (hill, burial mound) — the same hlāw behind Ludlow and Marlow |
| Pronunciation | WINZ-loh, two syllables, the s voiced like a z |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and rare; used quietly and continuously in New England, and lately by parents hunting unworn surname names |
| Variants | Winslowe, Wynslow |
| Nicknames | Win, Winn, Slow if the child has a sense of humour about it |
| The place | Winslow, Buckinghamshire, recorded in an Anglo-Saxon charter as Wineshlauu |
History & meaning
Old English wine means friend, and it was a name in its own right as well as a common second element — it is still visible in Edwin, Godwin, Baldwin and Alvin. Hlāw is a hill, but with a particular flavour: it very often meant an artificial mound, a barrow raised over a burial. Read strictly, Winslow is the mound where a man called Wine lies, and the Buckinghamshire town that bears the name appears in an Anglo-Saxon charter as Wineshlauu, long before the Domesday surveyors got to it.
English families took the name to Massachusetts early. Edward Winslow crossed on the Mayflower in 1620, served three separate terms as governor of Plymouth Colony and wrote the account that supplies almost everything known about the first harvest feast. That made Winslow a New England surname of standing, and New England did what it does: it began giving the family name to sons as a first name. The greatest result was Winslow Homer, born in Boston in 1836, who covered the Civil War for Harper's Weekly as a young illustrator and spent his last decades at Prouts Neck in Maine painting the North Atlantic hitting rock. Further west, the railway town of Winslow, Arizona was named for a different Winslow altogether, and the Eagles put it in a song in 1972; there is now a statue on the corner.
Why parents choose it
It has the two things surname names are chosen for — a discreet upper-class New England sound and a short, warm nickname in Win — plus something most of them lack, which is a first-rate namesake. Winslow Homer is the kind of association that carries a name for a lifetime without weighing it down.
Middle names for Winslow
The -ow ending drifts, so anchor it: Winslow James, Winslow Grant, Winslow Alexander, Winslow Reed. Two of those are one syllable on purpose. The middle names guide explains why that works.
Famous Winslows
Winslow Homer is the central figure: watercolourist, war correspondent and, in his Maine years, the painter of The Gulf Stream and the Prouts Neck seascapes. Edward Winslow, carrying it as a surname, governed Plymouth Colony and negotiated with Massasoit. Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, first staged in 1946, took the real Archer-Shee case and made the family name a byword for a father's stubborn pursuit of justice.
Consider instead
Winston shares the Win- opening and comes with rather more history attached to it. Weldon is the same kind of English hill name and even rarer. Wilder trades the New England restraint for something a good deal louder.