Table of contents
Boy name origins & meanings
- Old English : Welshman
How Popular Is The Name Wallace
Family name origins & meanings
- Scottish and northern Irish : from Anglo-Norman French waleis ‘Welsh’ (from a Germanic cognate of Old English wealh ‘foreign’), hence an ethnic name for a Welsh speaker. In some cases this clearly denoted an incomer to Scotland from Wales or the Welsh Marches, but it may also have denoted a Welsh-speaking Scot: in western Scotland around Glasgow, the Welsh-speaking Strathclyde Britons survived well into the Middle Ages.
- Jewish : this surname has been adopted in the 19th and 20th centuries as an Americanized form of various Ashkenazic Jewish surnames, e.g. Wallach.