The ras Surname
ras Name Meaning and History
- Czech (Raš) and Polish (Ras): from a pet short form of any of various Slavic personal names with the first element rad- ‘joyful’ or raci- ‘to fight’.
- Spanish: from ras ‘level’ (ultimately from Latin radere ‘to scrape’); perhaps a topographic name for someone who lived on flat land.
- Catalan: topographic name for someone who lived on bare, barren land, from ras ‘shorn’, ‘bare’, ‘peeled’.
- French: from ras ‘bare’, ‘shorn’, ‘close-shaven’, hence a topographic name for someone who lived on bare or razed land, or a nickname for someone with closely cropped hair.
- Dutch: nickname for a nimble person, from ras ‘quick’, ‘swift’.
- Altered spelling of German Rass, from a Germanic personal name Rasso, or of South German and Swiss Räss, a nickname for someone cheeky or sharp, from Middle High German ræze ‘sharp’, ‘wild’, ‘caustic’.
Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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