Word Stories: surnames

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

“What’s in a name?” Juliet Capulet asks Romeo Montague. Sadly for them, the answer turns out to be quite a lot. Surnames identify individuals, families and dynasties, and to trawl through them is to explore a living history of occupations, immigration and social change. Your surname (‘additional name’, Old French prefix sur-, from the Latin super- ‘above, besides, in addition’) might say nothing about you, but it may say something about at least one of your ancestors.

During the medieval period in Britain, you might be given a name to distinguish you from all the other Johns, Marys and Thomases in one of four main ways. The first is to be known as the son of your father (Johnson, O’Connor, McDonald, etc). The second is to be named after some characteristic such as hair colour or physical size (Black, Brown, White, Reid, Little, Long, etc).

You might also find yourself named after some kind of geographical feature or town. Names such as Heath, Wood, Hill and Fields are obvious examples. Knowles also falls into this category, coming ultimately from knoll (hilltop, small hill). Other perhaps less obvious examples include Whitaker (white acre), Clough (valley with steep sides) and Becket (the head or source of the beck, a northern word for brook or stream).

The other main way in which people acquired surnames was, as names like Baker, Butcher, Carter, Potter, Smith and Taylor attest, to be named after their occupation. Many of these are fairly obvious, but what did Messrs. Fletcher, Cooper and Spencer do? A fletcher (from Old French flèche arrow) made arrows, a cooper (ultimately from Latin cupa cask) made casks and barrels and a spencer (ultimately from Latin dispensare dispense) was a steward or butler in charge of a household.

There’s a fascinating tool at Public Profiler GB Names. Enter a surname and the website produces a map of Britain showing the distribution of that surname. Knowles, for example, is concentrated in the north-west of England (the area I come from) in both 1881 and 1998, despite spreading a little over the country over the course of 117 years. Try different surnames and see what it tells you about British history.

If there are any aspects of English words you've always wondered about, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll see if I can come up with an answer.