Read more
With over 80,000 entries, 10,000 brand new, and thousands more revised and expanded, the second edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names explains the meanings of the family names for more than 90 percent of the US population. The product of seventeen years of exhaustive research, the dictionary provides comparative frequencies, linguistic and historical explanations, selected associated forenames, and occasional genealogical notes, revealing the meanings of names, some intuitive, some amusing, and some quite surprising.
List of contents
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Contributors and Consultants
- General Introduction
- Introductions (to Surnames of Particular Languages and Cultures)
- A-Z
About the author
Dr. Patrick Hanks is a lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. For ten years (1990-2000) he was chief editor of current English Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. More recently, he has held research posts and taught linguistics and lexicology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Britain, America, and the Czech Republic. He is currently a visiting professor at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP, University of Wolverhampton, England). He is a frequent invited plenary speaker at international conferences on lexicography, corpus linguistics, figurative language, and onomastics.
Simon Lenarčič is a lexicographer and self-educated onomastician and orthographer from Slovenia. He is the author or editor of several Slovenian encyclopedias, name dictionaries, and books on orthography.
Dr Peter McClure is Honorary Professor of Name-Studies at the Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham, England, and is the leading authority on English surname origins and the author of numerous articles on English names of all types. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Hull, England (1965-90), specializing in Middle English and early Modern English. He was the founding editor of the onomastic journal Nomina (1977-85), is a past President of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, and is currently Vice-President of the English Place-Name Society (since 2013) and onomastic consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary (since 2007).
Summary
This revised and expanded second edition of Dictionary of American Family Names contains more than 80,000 of the most commonly occurring surnames in the United States, reflecting better than ever the unique diversity of the American population. All surnames with more than 300 bearers in the 2010 US Census are now included, increasing the number of names discussed by over 10,000 and widening the representation of languages and cultures from North and South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, many of which were absent from the first edition. Native American and African American surnames have been given particular attention, though much research still remains to be done in these important areas of American family history and naming practices. The product of a seventeen-year research project, gathering the contributions of over thirty linguistic consultants from all over the world, the dictionary explains the meanings-some intuitive, some amusing, and some quite surprising-of the family names for more than 90 percent of the US population, giving their comparative frequencies, linguistic and historical explanations, selected associated forenames, and occasional genealogical notes. The edition includes tens of thousands of new and corrected or improved etymologies, origins, and name histories, as well as authoritative introductory essays, many of them new or revised, describing naming customs across the globe.
Additional text
This dictionary is a tour de force because it represents the collaboration of a large number of academic scholars scattered across the globe, who have come together to produce an essential onomastic reference work that exemplifies a spirit of cooperation and team work that is quite difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, these scholars have banded together to produce a singularly excellent work. This dictionary will be a useful reference work for the general public, onomasticians, historians, genealogists, linguists, sociologists, and other scholars for a long time to come. The quality is remarkable. The second edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names belongs on the reference shelves of all major public and academic libraries and other related research institutions as an indispensable reference work.
