Family name origins & meanings
- English : probably a habitational name from a place in Devon named Bowditch, from the Old English phrase būfan dīce ‘above the ditch’.
- The surname Bowditch is well known in New England. Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), author of The Practical Navigator (1772), a standard work that went through more than sixty editions, was born in Salem, MA, the son of a shipmaster. The family can be traced back, via a clothier who settled in New England in 1671, to Thorncombe in Devon in the early 16th century.