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What's in a name - the origins and meanings of each Spearin variant

There are a lot of sources available on the internet and in published books that claim to know about surname origins, but how accurate these are is open to question. Here's an excerpt from the results for Spering at http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/spering

This unusual surname is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is a patronymic form of the surname Spear, which derives from the Olde English pre 7th Century personal byname "Spere", originally denoting either a tall, thin person, or one skilled in the use of the hunting spear. In part it may also have been a metonymic occupational name for a maker of spears ... In the modern idiom the patronymic forms of the name appear as: Spiring, Spering, Sperring and Spearing. 

Apart from doing a google search for history of surnames, other possible (more scholarly?) sources include:

A History of Surnames of the British Isles, by C. L. L'Estrange Ewen MacMillan Company, NY 1931.
The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning, and History, by George F. Block, PHD, NY Public Library, NY 1946.
A Dictionary of Surnames, by Hanks and Hodges, 1988.

http://home.earthlink.net/~odoniv/HamCountry/HAMCountry.html

http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Spearing

Maurice Gleeson, April 2011

What to do now?

Please feel free to email us suggestions, modifications and additions to this page. Specific areas where you could help include:

  1. Do you know any additional interesting facts or links that could go on this page.
  2. Why not search for the meaning of your own Spearin variant and write a short article about it (with your name and the date created at the end). We will upload it to this page.





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The Spearin Surname Project at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~spearin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Information and data obtained from the Spearin Surname Project must be attributed to the project as outlined in the Creative Commons License. Please notify administrator when using data for public or private research. 

Last update: April 2011

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