Updated June 9, 2019

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Family name origins & meanings

  • German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : from German Ochs ‘ox’, Middle High German ohse; probably a nickname for a strong or lumbering individual, or a metonymic occupational name for someone who tended or drove oxen, or for a cattle dealer. In some cases the surname was a habitational name derived from an inn sign. As a Jewish name it is often ornamental.
  • The New York Times publisher Adolph Simon Ochs (1858–1935), of German-Jewish stock, was a second-generation immigrant whose father, Julius Ochs, had come over from Fürth in Bavaria, Germany, in 1845 and settled in Louisville, KY, in the early 1800s.