Explore the Family Name Gordon

The meaning of Gordon

1. Scottish: habitational name from Gordon in Berwickshire, named with Welsh gor ‘spacious’ + din ‘fort’. 2. English (of Norman origin): habitational name from Gourdon in Saône-et-Loire, so called from the Gallo-Roman personal name Gordus + the locative suffix -o, -ōnis. 3. English (of Norman origin): alternatively, said to be a nickname from a diminutive of Old French gourd ‘heavy, dull, sluggish’ (compare 8 below). 4. Irish: adopted as an English equivalent of Gaelic Mag Mhuirneacháin, see Gordan. 5. Jewish (from Lithuania): probably a habitational name from the Belorussian city of Grodno. 6. Spanish and Galician (Gordón); Basque: habitational name from a place called Gordón (Spanish, Galician) or Gordon (Basque), of which there are examples in Salamanca, Galicia, and Basque Country. 7. Spanish: possibly in some instances from an augmentative of the nickname Gordo (see Gordillo). 8. French: of Scottish origin (see 1 above), or a variant of Gourdon (and, in North America, perhaps also an altered form of this), a nickname derived from Old French gourd ‘heavy, dull, sluggish’ (see Gourd, compare 3 above). 9. Americanized form of French Godin. History: This is the name of a Scottish clan associated with Strathbogie, Aberdeenshire, members of which have held various titles including Lord of Strathbogie, Duke of Gordon, Earl of Aboyne, and Earl and Marquess of Huntly; the head of the clan is the Marquess of Huntly. There have been Gordon links with Ulster since the 17th-century Plantation. — The Jewish surname Gordon, which goes back at least to 1657, is one of the old Ashkenazic surnames. In Eastern Europe, it was used well before the mass adoption of surnames by local Jews at the turn of the 19th century. Various suggestions, more or less fanciful, have been put forward as to its origin. There is a family tradition among some bearers that they are descended from a son of a Duke of Gordon, who converted to Judaism in the 18th century, but the Jewish surname was in existence long before the 18th century; others claim descent from earlier Scottish converts, but this is implausible.

Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd edition, © Oxford University Press, 2022.

What do people with the surname Gordon have in common?

Spoiler alert: it's complicated. People with the same last name are usually no more genetically similar than a randomly sampled group of people from the same population. That said, people with the same surname are more likely to have similar ancestries than randomly sampled individuals. The reason is the tendency of people with similar cultural or geographical backgrounds to preferentially mate with one another. That's why people who share a surname may be more likely to share traits and tendencies in common than people within the general population. Check out the percentages below to see the prevalences of tastes, habits, and traits of people with your surname compared with prevalences among 23andMe users.