Animal surnames

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Two of my favorites are Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, anthropologists who wrote The Imperial Animal, and who have four animal names between them.

Bird names that haven’t been mentioned yet are Wren, Stork, Sparrow, Raven, Kite, Heron, Bunting, Parrot(t), and Gannet(t).

It should be mentioned that some of the names offered are not actually animal names, but are only coincidentally the same. For example, “Shepherd” is certainly derived from the human profession, and not from the name of the dog.

22

I once worked with a woman who married a man named Donald Duck. I have no idea what his parents were thinking when they named him.

23

Grouse is a homograph. The name means “large”.

24

Of course there’s León, but it seems the derivation is not from the animal, but from the city.

25

More bird names: Brent (a kind of goose), Mallard, Teal, Harrier, Hobby (a kind of falcon), Crake, Snipe, Woodcock, Gull, Rook, Lark, Starling, Bullfinch, and Nightingale.

26

My own family name is an animal, but in a foreign language. There’s even a family Coat of Arms that depicts the animal

When I looked into the explanations for such animal surnames, the basic message I get it Nobody really knows. But there are plenty of surmises

  • The family lived where that animal was common
  • The family lived in or near a place named after that animal
  • The family was known as traders/breeders/keepers of that animal (especially domestic animal names, like Hogg)
  • Someone in the family looked like that animal
  • Someone in the family acted like that animal, or had some trait associated with the animal
  • They’re not really named after an animal, but what they were named after sounds the same, or the language has changed
    … and so on.
27

One of our sons had a teacher named Mr. Moose. If he’d had me for a student he would have gotten sick of being asked when ping pong balls were going to drop.

28

My aunt’s surname was Drake.

And keeping in the domestic fowl group, has anyone mentioned Ryan Gosling?

29

Cobb
Corpus
Lamb
Ham (not an animal…)

30

When we registered our dog, we gave him the same surname of our family.
Oh, you mean…people with animal names…never mind.

31

Including the guy from the band X. I think that may not be his birth name, though.

32

Trevor Peacock and his sons Harry & Daniel are all actors.

33

Terminology changes over time. Horse, Ox, and Deer are rare surnames, but long ago when family names were being handed out, Steed, Bullock, Hart, and Roe were probably more common terms, and they’re all pretty common names.

And there may have been many more animal surnames in the past. The Galton-Watson process was discovered in the 1870s. It has more applications than the extinction of surnames and families, but that was the original line of inquiry. Until the explanation of the process, it was sometimes assumed that rich, famous, titled, powerful, and respected people somehow had lower fertility than ordinary folk, because so many of the rich and famous families eventually died off without male heirs. In fact it’s a random process that affects all families; nobody seems to take much notice when it happens to poor families. By chance, as long as no new surnames are coined, a proportion of existing surnames will disappear every generation. In theory, if the process is allowed to continue for enough generations, all surnames except one will eventually go extinct. This process has been used to explain why the countries that have used surnames the longest, like Korea and China, have relatively few surnames.

34

Two related to goats…
Kidd
Chevrolet - chèvre is goat in French

35

Also Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Bob Moose, who no-hit the Mets in 1969.

Other deer names: Stag(g), Hind, Roebuck, Brocket(t)

36

In my youth, Australian politics had a twofer - Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his opposite number, opposition leader Andrew Peacock.

Australia also has a small handful of families surnamed Bilby, which I find rather interesting, as I’m not sure by what means New World animals would get on to the surname roster. No kangaroos, koalas or platypuses though, as far as I can tell.

37

And of course there’s the famous Blackadder

38

It’s coincidental. The name is from a village in Nottinghamshire.

I wondered the same thing about Moose, but it’s also coincidental, being derived from the German word for moss. It also has nothing to do with the animal.

Actor Peter Coyote’s original name was Cohon; he changed his name after a peyote induced vision of coyote tracks.

39

Again coincidental, the name coming from the Adder river, not the adder snake.

40

Well, there you go!

I was wondering if I’d fake someone out, and get a complaint that it wasn’t a real person… :wink: