Dictionary of American Family Names

With over 80,000 entries, 10,000 brand new, and thousands more revised and expanded, the second edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names explains the meanings of the family names for more than 90 percent of the US population. The product of seventeen years of exhaustive research, the dictionary provides comparative frequencies, linguistic and historical explanations, selected associated forenames, and occasional genealogical notes, revealing the meanings of names, some intuitive, some amusing, and some quite surprising.

Dr. Patrick Hanks is a lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. For ten years (1990-2000) he was chief editor of current English Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. More recently, he has held research posts and taught linguistics and lexicology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Britain, America, and the Czech Republic. He is currently a visiting professor at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP, University of Wolverhampton, England). He is a frequent invited plenary speaker at international conferences on lexicography, corpus linguistics, figurative language, and onomastics.

Simon Lenarčič is a lexicographer and self-educated onomastician and orthographer from Slovenia. He is the author or editor of several Slovenian encyclopedias, name dictionaries, and books on orthography.

Dr Peter McClure is Honorary Professor of Name-Studies at the Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham, England, and is the leading authority on English surname origins and the author of numerous articles on English names of all types. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Hull, England (1965-90), specializing in Middle English and early Modern English. He was the founding editor of the onomastic journal Nomina (1977-85), is a past President of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, and is currently Vice-President of the English Place-Name Society (since 2013) and onomastic consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary (since 2007).