Family name origins & meanings
- English : topographic name, from Middle English holy ‘holy’ + oke ‘oak’, for someone who lived near an oak tree with religious associations. This would have been one which formed a marker on a parish boundary and which was a site for a reading from the Scriptures in the course of the annual ceremony of beating the bounds.
- English : habitational name from the village of Holy Oakes in Leicestershire, recorded in Domesday Book as Haliach, and no doubt deriving its name as above, from Old English hālig ‘holy’ + āc ‘oak’.