Family name origins & meanings
- Dutch and German : occupational name for a stonemason or someone who used or made pickaxes or chisel, from bicke ‘pickaxe’, ‘chisel’ + the agent suffix -er. Compare Bick.
- English : occupational name for a beekeeper, Middle English biker (from Old English bīcere). Bees were important in medieval England because their honey provided the only means of sweetening food (sugar being a more recent importation); honey was also used in preserving.
- English : habitational name from Bicker in Lincolnshire or Byker in Tyne and Wear, both named with the Old English preposition bī ‘by’, ‘beside’ + Old Norse kjarr ‘wet ground’, ‘brushwood’.
- Cars Bicker was a wealthy merchant and one of the commissioners to New Netherland under the West India Company’s 1621 charter.