Boy name origins & meanings
- Old English : Noble man.(German) Mighty as a bear
Family name origins & meanings
- Scottish and northern Irish : habitational name from any of various places in southwestern Scotland, in particular Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, named with Gaelic barr ‘height’, ‘hill’ or a British cognate of this.
- English : topographic name for someone who lived by a gateway or barrier, from Middle English, Old French barre ‘bar’, ‘obstruction’.
- English (of Norman origin) : habitational name from any of various places in northern France called Barre. See Barre.
- English : habitational name from any of various places in England called Barr, for example Great Barr in the West Midlands, named with the Celtic element barro ‘height’, ‘hill’.
- English : from the vocabulary word barr ‘bar’, ‘pole’, either a metonymic occupational name for a maker of bars, or perhaps a nickname for a tall, thin man.
- Irish : from Ó Bairr, Donegal form of Ó Báire (see Barry 2).