Family name origins & meanings
- English and northern Irish : habitational name from places called Tournay in Calvados and Orne in northern France. In some cases it could be of English origin, from any of the places called Thorney, in Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, and Sussex, mostly named from Old English þorn ‘thorn tree’ + ēg ‘island’, although the Nottinhamshire example is from Old English þorn + haga ‘enclosure’.
- Irish : reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Torna ‘descendant of Torna’, a personal name.
- German (eastern) : topographic name and habitational name derived from a Slavic word, tarn-, meaning ‘brush made of thorns’.