What's in a name?

The Barber map

Wordlady loves the stories behind words, as you know. But she also loves the stories behind names: first names, family names, place names. The study of names is called "onomastics", from the Greek onoma meaning "name".

She also loves maps, so just imagine how excited she gets about a website that combines names and maps! So with my Namelady hat on, I would like to introduce you to the "Named" website, which I am sure will give you some fun.

"Named" maps places in  the UK where one (or two) surnames have a historically unusually high local population. It uses a recent UK electoral roll and was created in 2016. The data include names that are not originally British as well as names that go back to Anglo-Saxon times. If  you have a rare name it won't show the data for privacy reasons as it might allow someone to zero in on your house.

All you do is enter your surname, and the website maps where in the UK there is an unusually high number of people with that surname living.

The creator of the website, geographer Ollie O'Brien, has this to say about it:

Although it uses relatively recent data, it may well show you where your surname was historically most concentrated. It has been demonstrated that most traditional UK surname distributions remain surprisingly unchanged over many years – internal migration in the UK is a lot less than might be traditionally perceived.

The map shows places where you are unusually likely to bump into somebody with that name. In very rural areas  you don’t need to have very many people with a name for it to show up as a hotspot, because there aren’t very many people with any other names either. Whereas, in more populated parts of the country, you need a large number of people.

Give it a spin with your family names here

https://named.publicprofiler.org/

Let me know what you find out!

If you want to share your map with friends and relatives, you can right-click on the circle with the map in it, and choose "Save image as..."

For another post about surnames, see this post: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2019/06/when-your-surname-is-your-destiny.html

To see all Wordlady posts, click here: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/

When your surname is your destiny

I caught sight of this baker's delivery van as I was on my way to the subway the other day and thought, "Wow, how appropriate is that?" "Baxter" is an occupational name derived from the Anglo-Saxon word bæcestre meaning "a female baker".

In Anglo-Saxon, most masculine agent nouns (nouns denoting someone or something that performs the action of a verb) had an -ere ending, which has evolved into our -er suffix. Feminine agent nouns, on the other hand, had an -estre ending. Thus, 

a woman who sang was a

sangestre

a woman who sewed was a

séamestre

I particularly love, and feel we should revive, the word for a female dancer: a

hoppestre 

Anglo-Saxon apparently also felt the need for a word meaning "female poisoner or witch":

lybbestre

 

Most of these have died out, but some have survived as surnames, because they were common occupations, and ones typically filled by women in Anglo-Saxon times. 

Thus we have

Webster (a weaver)

Brewster (a brewer)

Dexter (a dyer)

and the above-mentioned

Baxter (a baker)

In the north of England, though, men started taking over trades like weaving, baking, and tailoring, and the -ster ending started to be used in a gender-neutral way. Thus we see a "person who judges", based on the Anglo-Saxon word "deem"  (overtaken by the French word "judge"), is a

Dempster (a judge)

  

One -ster word that has, just barely, survived, is 

spinster (originally "a woman who spins") 

but not as a family name for obvious reasons, once it came to mean "an unmarried woman". We won't be sad to see that one go.

Once -ster had become a gender-neutral ending, though, the language still felt the need for a specifically feminine ending, and fortunately the French had brought one with them: -ess, derived from Latin -issa. In our lovely "let's have a language mishmash" way, we just tacked that on and ended up transforming

sangestre into "songstress" and

séamestre into "seamstress" (with its now obsolete variant "sempstress")

By the 16th century all associations of -ster with feminine gender had been lost, paving the way for

gamester, jokester, punster, trickster  

and even words formed from adjectives, as in 

youngster 

and the more recent  

oldster

Although I might qualify as both a spinster and an oldster, I would warn you not to use those words of me in my presence!