Family name origins & meanings
- English (East Anglia) : metonymic occupational name for a piper, from Middle English pipe ‘pipe’ (Old English pīpe). In some cases it may have been a topographic name from the same word in the sense ‘waterpipe’, ‘conduit’, ‘water channel’, or a habitational name from Pipe in Herefordshire or Pipehill in Staffordshire, near Lichfield (earlier Pipa), both named from this word.
- English (East Anglia) : occasionally from a personal name, Pipe, which is recorded in Domesday Book.