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
1,890,339
Historical Documents & Family Trees with Moss
The information for this chart came from the U.S. Immigration Collection at Ancestry.co.uk.
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