Family name origins & meanings
- German (also Knöpf) and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : from Middle High German knopf ‘swelling’, ‘lump’, ‘knob’, ‘button’, ‘glob’, modern German Knopf, hence a metonymic occupational name for a maker of buttons, normally of horn; a nickname for a small, rotund man (especially in Swabia, where the term also has the sense ‘dumpling’); or a topographic name for someone who lived by a rounded hillock.