First name origin & meaning:
Old English: Welshman
First name variations: Wallis, Wallas, Wally, Wallie, Walsh, Welsh, Welch, Wallach
Last name origins & meanings:
- Scottish and northern Irish: from Anglo-Norman French
waleis ‘Welsh’ (from a Germanic cognate of Old English
wealh ‘foreign’), hence an ethnic name for a Welsh speaker. In
some cases this clearly denoted an incomer to Scotland from Wales or
the Welsh Marches, but it may also have denoted a Welsh-speaking Scot:
in western Scotland around Glasgow, the Welsh-speaking Strathclyde
Britons survived well into the Middle Ages.
- Jewish: this surname
has been adopted in the 19th and 20th centuries as an Americanized
form of various Ashkenazic Jewish surnames, e.g. Wallach.
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