rationalskepticism.org

Some surnames are easy to explain because they're just words in the language. You can even see how they got started. In a world where nobody had needed surnames before, if there were two Jameses in the same town but one made metal stuff and one made clothes, they'd be James the smith and James the tailor, and those would stick once people decided it would be good to have two names, especially if people also tended to learn and take up their fathers' trades. Or if one Robert was tall and the other was short, that could be the beginning of the names Long and Short and Little. Or if the first people to use a second name were described by where their houses were located, you get Hill, Waters, Forest, and Fields. But what about the words that don't so easily describe an individual (especially in a way that seems likely to stick for later generations)?

Why did anybody ever get described as "wolf" and have it stick? Was "mayer" or "meyer" ever an occupation like "shoemaker" is/was? (And is it related to "bayer"?) What did "perry" ever mean? Is "Connell" an import from a Celtic language?

I also wonder about common surname conventions in other languages. If "bin" or "ibn" means "son of" in Arabic, then what's "Al" or "El"? What does Russia's "ski" mean? And is "nguyen" a Vietnamese word for a job like "smith" or "farmer"?

Really I'm just looking for whatever anecdotes you might have on the origins & meanings of non-obvious names... like "cooper" being a word for a job that doesn't exist anymore (barrel-maker; barrels were once made of cypress wood, which is cupress{us} in Latin)... and "Bush" (supposedly) coming from winemakers' shops being marked for illiterate societies by a small shrubbery out front...