The moss Surname
moss Name Meaning and History
- English and Welsh: from the personal name Moss, a Middle English vernacular form of the Biblical name Moses.
- English and Scottish: topographic name for someone who lived by a peat bog, Middle English, Old English mos, or a habitational name from a place named with this word. (It was not until later that the vocabulary word came to denote the class of plants characteristic of a peat-bog habitat, under the influence of the related Old Norse word mosi.)
- Americanized form of Moses or some other like-sounding Jewish surname.
- Irish (Ulster): part translation of Gaelic Ó Maolmhóna ‘descendant of Maolmhóna’, a personal name composed of the elements maol ‘servant’, ‘tonsured one’, ‘devotee’ + a second element which was assumed to be móin (genitive móna) ‘moorland’, ‘peat bog’.
Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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