Why do so many last names sound like jobs?

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. Today, in honor of the upcoming Labor Day holiday in the United States, we'll talk about why some of our last names sound like jobs. But first, before we get into today's episode, this year marks 20 years of Grammar Girl. Can you believe it? Well, to celebrate, I'm hosting a Grammarpalooza game show on September 24th, and you are all invited. I have previous

0:32guests joining as contestants, and if you are a Grammar Girl supporter on Patreon, you also have a chance to participate too. The game show will be live streamed on Facebook and YouTube. And if you go to the website in RSVP now, you'll get a 20th anniversary digital excerpt from my best-selling book with a special note from me reflecting on the updates and what they mean. Go to quickanddirtytips.com slash gglive event for more information and save the date Thursday,

1:05September 24th at 5 p.m. Pacific, and we'll have all that in the show notes too. This segment is by Karen Lundy. Imagine you're strolling through a medieval village. You encounter a friend who asks if you've managed to repair the hole in your cottage roof, and you tell her that John will be coming by later to fix the damage. Which John, your friend asks? After all, there are several men in your village named John. So you reply, why, John the Thatcher, of course. But why not just

1:38use John's last name to make the distinction? Well, that's because he probably doesn't have one yet. What he has is something different called a by-name. Think of it as a sort of linguistic name tag to separate one John from another. Before we used surnames, we often distinguish people with the same name from one another by their unique traits. If Robert's father was named William, he might be called Robert's son of William. Location could also play a role. Alice might be set apart from other

2:13people named Alice because she lives in a cottage by a stream. So she's Alice by the brook. Appearance and personality could also play a role. A man of diminutive stature might be Richard the Short. And then we have the job names, which we'll talk about today. Because if you have one of them, it's possible that what your ancestors traditionally did for a living transformed into the surname you have today. So before we dig in, here are a couple of definitions. The study of names has a fun name

2:47itself, onomastics. And the types of names we're talking about today are called occupational surnames. So when did jobs start to become family names? Well, in England, occupational surnames showed up gradually. There was no law or decree that said everybody now had to have a last name. It was actually more a matter of convenience. If you wanted someone to clarify which Marcus you were talking about, it was easier to use the by name Marcus the Woodcarver rather than Marcus who's married to

3:23Isabel and has children named Elizabeth and Thomas. By the 13th and 14th centuries, by names were being replaced by actual surnames, family names that stuck across generations. And that means if you're Jacob Baker, your ancestor may actually have been a Baker, even if you currently work in the IT department. But wait, if your last name comes from an occupation, does that absolutely mean one of your distant

3:54ancestors did that job? Well, it's hard to say for sure. Usually the name does trace back to someone who was involved with that trade, but the genealogy isn't always quite so tidy. The surname Cooper, for example, originated as an occupational name for a cooper. That doesn't mean every present-day cooper got it by way of an unbroken genealogical line from a medieval barrel maker. The same surname could show up across many different towns and families. Time also changes things. Centuries of adoption,

4:29migration, migration, translation, and name changes can muddy the trail. So if you're a Baker, a Cooper, or a Fletcher, that tells you something about how your name might have originated, but not necessarily which ancestor first earned it. Here's the part where you might start thinking, well, my surname isn't occupational. But unless you've done your research, there's a chance you could be wrong. Some occupational surnames don't actually sound like occupations to our modern ears.

5:00Take the last name Wainwright, spelled W-A-I-N-W-R-I-G-H-T. That doesn't sound like a job we know of, but surprise! It's an occupational surname for someone who makes or repairs wagons. In fact, the W-R-I-G-H-T suffix comes from Old English werta, meaning worker or maker. If you've ever wondered why playwright is spelled the way it is with a W-R-I-G-H-T on the end, that's why. There are plenty of job

5:33names that aren't so transparent now. If your last name's Chandler, that name came from someone who made or sold candles. Fuller and Walker, those were workers who cleaned and thickened wool and cloth, part of which involved treating it with clay, called Fuller's Earth, and stomping on it with their feet. Mercers dealt in textiles or fine goods. Sawyers sawed wood. Carters drove or transported things by cart. And not every surname comes from a father's profession either. Some occupational

6:08surnames preserve traces of the way English once described women's work. Take Webster and Baxter, for example. Webster came from Old English webestra for female weaver. Baxter is a term used for a female baker. The S-T-E-R suffix was often used for female agents in Older English, although it's worth noting that it's not a perfectly tidy rule. Some of these terms were also applied to men, and over time, several became gender-neutral. So occupational surnames don't just preserve obsolete crafts.

6:42Sometimes they preserve older word formation distinctions about who performed those crafts. So far, the surnames we've talked about have mostly British origins, but these naming conventions aren't actually limited to that region. Occupational surnames are widespread, especially across Europe. In fact, they're one of the largest categories of German surnames. Mullers were Millers, Schneiders were Taylors, and Bowers were Farmers. Some surnames, like Smith, have counterparts in many languages.

7:14In England, it's Smith. In German, Schmidt. But in Polish, it's Kowalski. The K-O-W-A-L prefix is related to blacksmithing. In Russian, Kunetsav is related to the word for Smith, and in Arabic, it's Hadad. In Italian, the name Ferrari or Ferraro actually has a blacksmithing origin story, too. These occupational surnames fossilized old jobs, old words, and even old grammatical patterns long before we started typing

7:45them into little boxes. So the next time you meet someone named Baker, Cooper, Fletcher, or Wainwright, you'll know you're hearing a little piece of history preserved over centuries from a time when what people did for their trade was a handy way to tell one John from another. That segment was by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor. She writes I'll Go First, a newsletter where she shares her story and then hands you a writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her at igofirst.org.

8:21Finally, I have a familek story from Peter. Hi, Mignon. This is listener Peter from Denver. My familek is the word hoople. We encounter this word when traveling with a close family friend who introduced us to this word, which is a collective term for any foreign currency. Instead of crowns, marks, pesos, or pounds, we use the term hoople in any country that we visit for their currency. As in, can you believe how many hooples that meal cost?

8:55Hooples become a useful term in our travels and it always brings a chuckle. Thanks, Mignon. Love your show. Bye-bye. Thanks, Peter. The word hoople sounds especially handy if you travel a lot. And for everyone else, if you want to call with your familek, it's easy. The instructions are in the show notes and we'd love to hear it. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Rebecca Sebastian, Maram El-Nagib, Stephen Schepanski, Holly Hutchings, and Dan Fireopend, who is really enjoying the dungeon crawler Carl audiobooks. And I'm Mignon Fogarty,

9:30better known as Grammar Girl. And don't forget to register for the September 24th Game Show. And if you're listening where you can leave comments like Spotify or YouTube, tell me what your last name means. That's all. Thanks for listening.