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The harrington Surname

harrington Name Meaning and History

  1. English: habitational name from places in Cumbria, Lincolnshire, and Northamptonshire. The first gets its name from Old English Haferingtun ‘settlement (Old English tun) associated with someone called Hæfer’, a byname meaning ‘he-goat’. The second probably meant ‘settlement (Old English tun) of someone called Hæring’. Alternatively, the first element may have been Old English hæring ‘stony place’ or haring ‘gray wood’. The last, recorded in Domesday Book as Arintone and in 1184 as Hederingeton, is most probably named with an unattested Old English personal name, Heathuhere.
  2. Irish (County Kerry and the West): adopted as an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hArrachtáin ‘descendant of Arrachtán’, a personal name from a diminutive of arrachtach ‘mighty’, ‘powerful’.
  3. Irish (County Kerry): adopted as an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hIongardail, later Ó hUrdáil, ‘descendant of Iongardal’.
  4. Irish: reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hOireachtaigh ‘descendant of Oireachtach’, a byname meaning ‘member of the assembly’ or ‘frequenting assemblies’.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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harrington Family Facts

Distribution of harrington Families in the US in 1920
Number of harrington families
 838-1673
 280-837		 1-279
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.co.uk from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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