Family name origins & meanings
- English : topographic name for someone who lived beside a stream, Old English burna, burne ‘spring’, ‘stream’, or a habitational name from a place named with this word, for example Bourn in Cambridgeshire or Bourne in Lincolnshire. This word was replaced as the general word for a stream in southern dialects by Old English brōc (see Brook) and came to be restricted in meaning to a stream flowing only intermittently, especially in winter.