Origins of 45,000 surnames are revealed

The origin of more than 45,000 surnames has been revealed by a team of university researchers.

Farah, Twelvetrees and Li are among the 8,000 family names explained for the first time, alongside corrections to previous explanations such as Starbuck and Hislop.

A four-year study, led by a team from the University of West of England in Bristol, has investigated the linguistic origins, history and geographical distribution of 45,600 most frequent family names in Britain and Ireland.

They found that nearly 40,000 family names are native to Britain and Ireland, while the remainder reflect the diverse languages and cultures of immigrants who have settled from the 16th Century to the present day, including French Huguenot, Dutch, Jewish, Indian, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and African.

The findings have been published in the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland.

Professors Patrick Hanks and Richard Coates led a team of researchers including historical linguists, medieval historians, lexicographers and expert advisers on Irish, Scottish, Welsh and recent immigrant names.

The team analysed records from published and unpublished sources dating from the 11th to the 19th Century to enable new and detailed explanations of names that is more reliable and up to date than those currently available.

Much of the evidence is new, drawn from previously untapped medieval and modern sources such as tax records, church registers and census returns.