A look at the meaning and origins of Western surnames

Then there’s the town of Torpenhow, with tor, pen and how all deriving from archaic (English, Welsh and Norse, respectively) words for hill. Frequently I see “Torpenhow Hill” referenced, but apparently it’s unclear if the hill the town is on is actually called that. If it is, as a quadruple redundancy, it beats out a lot of other place names that are only double or triple redundancies - which apparently isn’t that uncommon.

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John is a shortened form of the original Johannes, which can change in all sorts of ways depending on language and accent.

One form, common on Flemish and in Yorkshire in the middle ages, was to take the middle syllable as the one with the emphasis, to get Hann. And a diminutive of that was to add -cōk. So you get Hanecok Birun in 1276, and Henecok Coton in 1319 who is probably the same person named John de Coton. And you might have patronyms, so John Hancokes 1316 (that is, John, son of Hancock). Middle English also did unmarked patronyms, where one given name would just be added to another as a distinguisher. Thus Thomas Hancoc in 1274.

It doesn’t help that -nn- and -nd- sound so similar in some contexts that they were common spelling variants, which is why Handcock is a common form of the name.

And if you want a short summary of some of the etymological descendants of the original Greek Ἰωάννης, there’s
Iohannes, Ioan, Ifan, Evan, Eoin, Iain, Jehanne, Jean, Seán, Shaun, Giovanni, Juan, João, Hans, Jan, János, and Åns.

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You left out the cool ones - Jens and Django.

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Great stuff, that two fingered guitar soloing was wild. :slight_smile:

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Have you met Death Jr. yet?


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And his little pet.
image

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They could have gone for the quintuple redundancy, as hills are usually called fells in Cumbria.

Torpenhowfell Hill

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Is one of them this fellow?

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FWIW, this is a good resource for Jewish genealogy:

https://www.jewishgen.org

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