Explore the Family Name Straker

The meaning of Straker

English: 1. occupational name from Middle English straker, streker, unrecorded derivatives of northern Middle English straken (Old English strācian) ‘to stroke or rub (something), to smear (something with a substance)’ and Middle English streken (Old Norse strjúka) ‘to stroke, make smooth, spread or smear (a substance) evenly’. In some instances straker, streker may have denoted a waxer of shoe-leather or a sharpener of knives. In other cases a straker or streker may have been a polisher of goods made of wood, metal, or other materials, or he may have been an official corn measurer, who used a flat stick or strike to level off the quantity of corn he was measuring. See also the etymologically related Striker and Stroker, which were probably to some extent synonymous and interchangeable with Straker. 2. perhaps an occupational name for someone who made iron strakes in a smithy, or for someone who used strakes to make wheels or plowshares. This would be a plausible, though unrecorded derivative of Middle English strake (Old English stracca) ‘band, strip, strake’, most often used to denote the strips of iron that formed the rim of a cartwheel or that fastened a plowshare. Middle English strake also denoted a wooden plank, including the planking on a ship’s hull, so the surname could also have been given to someone who made planks or who built ships. However, there is no contextual evidence to confirm either of these possibilities.

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