Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd Edition: 5-Volume Set

About the Author\nDr. 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.\nSimon 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.\nDr 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).\nThis 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.