Where does this name originate? What does it mean?
It means “not only” in Dutch, at least according to Google Language Tools.
Ten is a Dutch preposition meaning, essentially, “at”. Corrie Ten Boom’s name would translate as Corrie Atwood. The Ten Eyck family were early Dutch settlers; a major street in my home town was named for them.
It’s definitely Dutch origin; I went to school with a couple of kids with that surname.
Yeah, the surname is common in my home area, a Dutch-american enclave. Along with Ten Haken, Ten Dolle, and others.
It’s common in the Gelderse Achterhoek region of the Netherlands, near and in Winterswijk and Aalten.
that’s funny - I’ve never heard of anyone with that name in The Netherlands. Also, all the google results I get are from the US. But then I’m not from the Achterhoek (the lord be blessed and praised, etc.). Sorry about your home region, Qadgop, but, as we say in Dutch, I would not want to found dead there (which somehow is our way of saying we don’t like a place very much).
Ten is actually the combination of ‘te’, meaning ‘at’, and the male accusative article ‘den’; the female version would be ‘ter’* - I’m sure there’s some surnames that start with that. ‘Pas’ can refer to a whole bunch of things:
- a step (as in: five steps from here; they walked in step)
- a pass or card (as in: passport, bank card, student card, senior citizen’s pass, etc.; not as in ‘He got a pass’ = ‘he passed the course’)
- pass! - I don’t know, someone else try
- a spirit level
- a mountain pass (which we don’t have in the Netherlands, not even in de Achterhoek)
as an adverb (which it cannot be because it has to be a noun, but just for completeness sake)
- ‘recently’ (I recently did that - Ik heb dat **pas **gedaan) OR
- ‘only’ (I only found out when you told me - Ik kwam er **pas **achter, toen je het me vertelde)
As to the meaning of ‘Ten Pas’, I’m drawing a blank. Intriguingly, to be ‘goed te pas’ (goed meaning good) is to be in a good mood. If something comes ‘van pas’, it comes in handy. It’s not clear to me what ‘pas’ means in any of these cases. This databank of Dutch surnames (which tells us that there was 341 ‘Ten Passes’ in the Netherlands in 1947, and some more named either Tepas, Te Pas or Te Paske) offers no solution, all it tells us is that it is a so called ‘address name’, meaning that it refers to a person’s or family’s location. What that location is remains unclear to me.
- just like in German you have ‘zu + der = zur’, ‘zu + dem = zum’;
Checking over some geneology stuff I have, I’ve turned up the surname pretty much in and around Winterswijk. Oldest one I found was born 1692.
Huh. Never noticed this before. His father (b 1664) and grandfather (died 1664, no birth date) are “te Pas”. Not ten. I wonder if that’s a typo or if the name shifted. But around that same time period (1600s and earlier), there are other “te” and “ten” surnames. I wonder if some of it isn’t issues with spelling/literacy too - I see multiple instances where a son has a different-spelled surname from his father, including at least one time where the grandson’s surname uses the grandfather’s spelling.
Seems like the further back I go, the more “te” outnumbers “ten” - and I even found a couple “ter” names.
well, the difference between Te and Ten is whether you subsume the article or not - it is the difference between ‘at’ and ‘at the’. So both Ten Pas and Te Pas can exist side by side (as they do today in The Netherlands - see post #6). If you are finding people named ‘Ter Pas’, it means they got the gender of Pas wrong, or that it changed.
No, other surnames actually. Interesting info though, thank you.
Hey, my ancestors departed Aalten (and Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Zuid-Beveland areas in Zeeland) over 150 years ago, so it’s no skin off my cheese! 
I would be curious about what it is about that region you disdain. Certainly many of my ancestors from there were stubborn, unyielding Calvinists who left that area because they thought it was getting too liberal :eek:
And thanks for the language lesson, I do enjoy that sort of stuff!
it’s not really disdain, more like the sort of tired arrogant disregard that us city folk have for any place rural. Ironically though, if you would want to find people steeped in righteous Calvinism - the kind that is still anti-papist and that opposes innoculations and television - the province of Gelderland is the place to be these days! If you ever thought the Netherlands was a liberal country were people can do whatever they like and smoke all the grass they want you have not been to many parts of Gelderland. Actually, come to think of it, you’ve probably not been to the Netherlands at all… Anyway, I was scammed out of 60 euros once by a guy from Winterswijk but that’s really all the direct hatred that I can muster against the Achterhoek specifically. I don’t even dislike their football team, so there you go.
any time, glad you enjoyed it
There was a guy on TV here last night called Marc in het Panhuis , which again I assume is also Dutch, but I’ve never seen a name in that form before.
Not so! I visited the ancestral Mercotan home outside of Dinxperlo, along with visiting my grandmother’s birthplace in Zuid Beveland. Interesting.
But for the fun times, I hung out in Amsterdam and wandered around the oudezijds voorburgwal area. Just looking, of course! 
Anyway, my kinsmen still hold fast to the Calvinist ways here in the new country. So I expect they’d feel comfortable going back to the Achterhoek. Except of course, for the fact that not all folks in the Achterhoek speak american english like Jesus did.
“Mark of the pancake house???” Maybe not.
No, it’s Marc in the Pan House. (Which obviously makes so much more sense in a surname … :smack:). I don’t know, there’s some pretty outlandish last names I guess. I’m glad mine’s normal
That must have been interesting, I can’t imagine what it must be like to travel so far to visit you’re ancestral home - you must be glad it’s still there! Sorry, Qadgop, I wasn’t referring to you just now, but to an imaginary person supposing that the Netherlands is all dykes and reefers. I was suggesting in a roundabout way that someone like that probably did not the Netherlands, but I didn’t mean to suggest anything about whether you visited the Netherlands. What I’m trying to say is that when I wrote ‘you’ I meant another ‘you’ than you.
I should be getting to bed… backing away from the computer now…
Obligatory link to the iron-on transfer manufacturers’ favourite football player. (And his shirt.)
Note that “of” means “or”. Kind of “I have two surnames and I’m too lazy to choose between them.” 
Hesselinks are all over the place in my home area too. Lots of other -inks and -dinks too.
Jerald terHorst was press secretary for President Ford in 1974. He quit when Ford pardoned Nixon. There are other terHorsts out there which you can find on Wikipedia.
Thanks, I’d been looking for that name to add to this thread. I still remember the Doonesbury strip when he was announced as Ford’s press secretary, wherein he was asked by the press to change his name as it looked like a printing error 
He of course readily agreed, although I forget what he suggested to change his own name to … a bit of searching finds a suggestion they were “Smith”, “Kojak”, and “Trigger”.
From what i have always been told as to the Origin of the surname “Ten Pas” is that it mean “at the woods” or “of the Woods” that’s what my grandfather told me when i was younger, which would make sense because from what i understand his family clan were farmers and lived in a very rural community in southern Netherlands approximately 20 miles from the German border. I have never really looked into it but there may be some German influence in the name as well.