“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked as she and Romeo tried to puzzle their way around the troubling problem of their warring families. Well, plenty, the most detailed investigation into surnames in the UK and Ireland has found. A team of researchers has spent four years studying the meanings and origins of almost 50,000 surnames, from the most common to the highly obscure. Some names have been around for many centuries while other more recent arrivals are explained for the first time in the work, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, which is published on Thursday. A four-year study by linguists and historians of British and Irish records back to 11th century analyses family names.
Read The Guardians Article here
Read The Guardians Article here
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