Table of contents
Boy name origins & meanings
- Old English : Fertilized pasture
Boy name variations
How Popular Is The Name Gordon
Family name origins & meanings
- Scottish : habitational name from a place in Berwickshire (Borders), named with Welsh gor ‘spacious’ + din ‘fort’.
- English (of Norman origin) and French : habitational name from Gourdon in Saône-et-Loire, so called from the Gallo-Roman personal name Gordus + the locative suffix -o, -ōnis.
- Irish : adopted as an English equivalent of Gaelic Mag Mhuirneacháin, a patronymic from the personal name Muirneachán, a diminutive of muirneach ‘beloved’.
- Jewish (from Lithuania) : probably a habitational name from the Belorussian city of Grodno. It goes back at least to 1657. Various suggestions, more or less fanciful, have been put forward as to its origin. There is a family tradition among some bearers that they are descended from a son of a Duke of Gordon, who converted to Judaism in the 18th century, but the Jewish surname was in existence long before the 18th century; others claim descent from earlier Scottish converts, but this is implausible.
- Spanish and Galician Gordón, and Basque : habitational name from a place called Gordon (Basque) or Gordón (Spanish, Galician), of which there are examples in Salamanca, Galicia, and Basque Country.
- Spanish : possibly in some instances from an augmentative of the nickname Gordo (see Gordillo).