Oxford's new dictionary of UK, Irish family names

“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked as she and Romeo tried to puzzle their way around the troubling problem of their warring families. Well, plenty, the most detailed investigation into surnames in the UK and Ireland has found.

A team of researchers has spent four years studying the meanings and origins of almost 50,000 surnames, from the most common to the highly obscure. Some names have been around for many centuries while other more recent arrivals are explained for the first time in the work, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, which was published this week.

There are dozens of obvious ones linked to occupations, such as Smith (a name carried by more than half a million British and Irish people), or to place names, such as Leicester, Sutton or Green. There are also many that began life as nicknames, such as Longbones and Goodfellow.

But there are also some that could not be guessed at, such as Campbell. The surname used to be represented in Latin documents as de campo bello (of the beautiful field). The new dictionary, however, spells out that it comes from the Gaelic for crooked mouth.

Richard Coates, professor of linguistics at the University of Western England (UWE), says there was great interest in the origins of family names. (His own may stem from one of the numerous places called Coates, or from the Old English “cot”, for cottage or workman’s hut.)