Family name origins & meanings
- German : variant of Off.
- German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : from Middle High German oven, German Ofen ‘oven’, a metonymic occupational name for a baker, or, as a German name, for someone who had charge of the communal village oven and was empowered to exact payment in kind for its use. It may also be a topographic name for someone who lived near a kiln or in an area or field named with this word.
- German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : habitational name for someone from Buda, now part of Budapest in Hungary, known in Middle High German as Ofen.