Simon Family History

English (Lancashire), French, Walloon, Breton, German, Dutch, Hungarian, northern Italian, and Jewish (Ashkenazic); Spanish (Simón); Czech and Slovak (mainly Šimon); Slovenian, Croatian, and Rusyn (from Slovakia) (also Šimon): from the Biblical personal name Hebrew Shim‘on, which is probably derived from the Hebrew verb sham‘a ‘to hearken’. In the Vulgate and in many vernacular versions of the Old Testament, this is usually rendered Simeon.

In the Greek New Testament, however, the name occurs as Simōn, as a result of assimilation to the pre-existing Greek byname Sīmōn (from sīmos ‘snub-nosed’). Both Simon and Simeon were in use as personal names in western Europe from the Middle Ages onward.

In Christendom, the former was always more popular, at least in part because of its associations with the apostle Simon Peter, the brother of Andrew. In Britain, there was also confusion from an early date with Anglo-Scandinavian forms of Sigmund(r) or Sigmund (see Siegmund), a name whose popularity was reinforced at the Conquest by the Norman form Simund.

In North America, this surname has also absorbed cognates from other languages, e.g., Italian Simone, Polish Szymon, Albanian Simoni, and Assyrian/Chaldean or Arabic Shimun, Shamon, or Shamoun, and also their derivatives (see examples at Simons).

See also Shimon.