• Home
    • About the Guild
    • About one-name studies
    • Starting your ONS
    • Conducting ONS (videos)
    • Join Us
    • Guild Shop
  • Studies
    • Surnames A-Z
    • Recent Registrations
    • Study websites
    • Registered Societies
  • News
    • General News
    • Education News
    • Guild Public Newsletters
  • Forums
    • Facebook (public page)
  • Events
    • Calendar
    • Conference
    • Seminar events
    • Guild Webinars
  • Resources
    • DNA
    • Fun Zone
    • Guild Indexes
    • Guild Journal
    • Knowledge Zone – Presentations
    • Members’ Websites
    • Modern Surnames
    • Newspaper Index
    • Pharos ONS Courses
    • Speakers
    • Those Who Served
  • Help
    • Reset your password
    • Contact Us
  • Log In

Guild of One-Name Studies

One-name studies, Genealogy

Is your surname here?

    • 2,224 members
    • 2,138 studies
    • 7,589 surnames

Taxonomy

Introduction

I commenced this (still very incomplete) section as a putative taxonomy to help me understand more about the subject, through its possible structure.

But from the start I encountered difficulties.

Any taxonomy imposes one particular perspective: a decision has to be made as to which aspects to group together, and which to separate.

These aspects might be termed:

  • Source Language
  • Ethnic Group
  • Type – (Patronyms/Occupational/Toponyms etc)
  • Morphology (form of the word e.g. prefixes/suffixes, plurals)

For example, Patrick Hanks’s taxonomy for family names of the United States rightly regards the type of name as paramount; thus bringing together occupational names of all cultural groups.

For Great Britain, however, the ethnic mix is less, whilst the potential time-scales are longer. For these reasons, the first cut has been arbitrarily made as:

Assimilated
source language
Non-Assimilated
source language
|
Type
|
Type
|
Morphology
|
Morphology

This first division is ambiguous and open to criticism (e.g. are medieval Jewish names to be treated as assimilated, and 20th century arrivals as non-assimilated?).

Nonetheless, most surnames in Britain have origins in widely-differing early source languages, Old English/Continental Germanic/Scandinavian, that a non-specialist is unaware of, whilst discerning the origins of recent arrivals.

In essence, this assimilated/non-assimilated category is merely just a pragmatic device to separate post-Victorian name arrivals, as most name studies will involve pre-Edwardian source documents, and as you might gather, it is one that I am not too comfortable with.

Surnames, by their often unknown origins, can be impossible to uniquely classify. They are slippery eels.

“A surname like Stevens may mean:

    ‘son of Stephen’,
    ‘servant of Stephen’,or
    ‘servant at Stephen’s house’, or it may be
    a metronymic (i.e., a name after one’s mother) derived from a form Stevenes ‘Stephen’s wife’…”

Source: Percy H. Reaney A Dictionary of British Surnames London, Routledge and Paul, 1958.

In this particular case, you need to decide whether to assign it to a primary category, or to all possible ones.

Another area of ambiguity is status nicknames. A name like Pope is not likely to be derived from an actual position, but more likely to have been a role in a pageant.

I mentioned different perspectives earlier. You might wish to look at all types of names that derive from

  • the same source language,
  • names by gender e.g. female names,
  • the morphology of a name.

I have included an alternative classification that groups these.

Notation

I have not included any notation, because this taxonomy is experimental and embryonic.
Also, the idea is not for each aspect of a name to be recorded by a relevant notation, and perhaps stored in a database
But here is an example:

Brewster

Analysis

  • Occupational name by craft
  • Female name by Gender
  • Morphology – er ending
  • Source Language – English

The source language, gender (though perhaps not the morphology) could be notated as standard sub-divisions (in the same way that in the Dewey Decimal system .942 is the standard subdivision for England, thus 320-942 = Political History of England, 330.942 =Economic History of England)

Hence the code could be for the language .19107, gender .1922

3a//3b5/.1922/.19107

Then there will also be temporal and spatial sub-divisions (for the hearth tax, census, electoral roll), and the notation becomes totally unwieldy.
Rather, I would envisage a taxonomy with radio buttons that is linked to an Access database

Actually, I have decided no longer to pursue a taxonomy per se. Rather I want to convey an idea of the complexity of the subject, and an indication of which areas are being studied, and a flavour of the writing. There is no name for this – so I am using the term ‘aspect map’ instead. Pretty naff, and I may change it.

Structure

  • Personal surnames
  • Surnames of Relationship
  • Occupational
  • Topographical
  • Toponymic
  • Nicknames
  • Variant perspective
  • Non-assimilated

THIS IS A DEFAULT WIDGET WHICH SHOULD NOT DISPLAY. DO NOT DELETE THIS.

Modern British Surnames

ww1

  • Modern British Surnames
    • About the research
    • Distribution
    • Variance
    • Statistics
    • Bibliography
    • Teaching
    • Taxonomy
      • Personal names
      • Relationship names
      • Occupation names
      • Topographic names
      • Toponyms
      • Nicknames
      • Cross-facets
      • Naming systems

Other Guild Websites

You may find our other Guild websites of interest:

  • Members’ Websites Program
  • Surname Cloud
  • Guild Members’ records on FamilySearch
  • Guild Marriage Locator

Contact Us

Email: Guild General Contact
Postal address:
c/o Treasurer,
3 Windsor Gardens,
Herne Bay,
Kent, CT6 8FE. UK.
Call us free on:
UK: 0800 011 2182
US & Canada: 1-800-647-4100
Australia: 1800 305 184

Follow Us


  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • YouTube

Guild of One-Name Studies Policies:    Privacy   CIO Membership and Registration Conditions   Sales   COVID-19 Impact

© 2013–2025 Guild of One-Name Studies CIO. Registered Charity in England and Wales, No. 1197944.