or, and Brown. Thus, of our three commonest
names, the first two are occupative and the third is a nickname.
French has no regular equivalent, though Dupont and Durand are
sometimes used in this way--

"Si Chateaubriand avait eu nom Durand ou Dupont, qui sait si son Genie
du Christianisme n'eut point passe pour une capucinade?"

(F. Brunetiere.)

The Germans speak of Mueller, Meyer and Schulze, all rural names, and
it is perhaps characteristic that two of them are official. Meyer is
an early loan from Lat. major, and appears to have originally meant
something like overseer. Later on it acquired the meaning of farmer,
in its proper sense of one who farms, i.e. manages on a profit-sharing
system, the property of another. It is etymologically the same as our
Mayor, Mair, etc. Schulze, a village magistrate, is cognate with Ger.
Schuld, debt, and our verb shall.

OCCUPATIVE NAMES

Taking the different classes of surnames separately, the six commonest
occupative names are Smith, Taylor, Clark, Wright, Walker, Turner. If
we exclude Clark, as being more often a nickname for the man who could
read and write, the sixth will be Cooper, sometimes spelt Cowper.

The commanding position of Smith is due to the fact that it was
applied to all workers in every kind of metal. The modern Smiths no
doubt include descendants of medieval blacksmiths, whitesmiths,
bladesmiths, locksmiths, and many others, but the compounds are not
common as surnames. We find, however, Shoosmith, Shearsmith, and
Nasmyth, the last being more probably for earlier Knysmith, i.e.
knife-smith, than for nail-smith, which was supplanted by Naylor.
Grossmith I guess to be an accommodated form of the Ger. Grobschmied,
blacksmith, lit. rough smith, and Goldsmith is very often a Jewish
name for Ger. Goldschmid.

Wright, obsolete perhaps as a trade name, has given many compounds,
including Arkwright, a maker of bins, or arks as they were once
called, Tellwright, a tile maker, and many others which need no
interpretation. The high position of Taylor is curious, for there
were other names for the trade, such as Seamen, Shapster, Parmenter
(Chapter XVIII), and neither Tailleur nor Letailleur are particularly
common in French. The explanation is that this name has absorbed the
medieval Teler and Teller, weaver, ultimately belonging to Lat. tela,
a web;--cf. the very common Fr. Tellier and Letellier. In some cases
also the Mid. Eng. teygheler, Tyler, h