King Family History

English: nickname from Middle English king ‘king’ (Old English cyning cyng) perhaps acquired by someone with kingly qualities or as a pageant name by someone who had acted the part of a king or had been chosen as the master of ceremonies or ‘king’ of an event such as a tournament festival or folk ritual. In North America, the surname King has absorbed several European cognates and equivalents with the same meaning, for example, German König (see Koenig) and Küng, French Roy, Slovenian, Croatian, or Serbian Kralj, Polish Krol.

It is also very common among African Americans. It is also found as an artificial Jewish surname. English: occasionally from the Middle English personal name King, originally an Old English nickname from the vocabulary word cyning cyng ‘king’. Irish: adopted for a variety of names containing the syllable rí (which means ‘king’ in Irish).

Native American: loose translation into English (and shortening) of a personal name such as Cheyenne Vehoeso ‘Little Chief’, which is from a diminutive of veho ‘chief’. See also Chief. Chinese: variant Romanization of the surname 金, possibly based on the Foochow dialect spoken in Fuzhou in Fujian province, see Jin.

Chinese: Cantonese form of the surnames 景, 荊, 敬 and 經, also variant Romanization of the surnames 井, see Jing 1-4 and 6.7: Chinese: possibly from Cantonese form of the Chinese name 敬 (meaning ‘esteem, respect’) a monosyllabic personal name or part of a disyllabic personal name of some early Chinese immigrants in the US.