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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • English : from Middle English, Old English box ‘box tree’ (Latin buxus), in any of a number of possible applications. It may have been a topographic name for someone who lived by a box thicket, a habitational name from one of the places called Box, in Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, and Wiltshire, or a metonymic occupational name for someone who worked box wood, which is very hard and for this reason was used to make a variety of tools. In some cases it may even have been a nickname for a person with pale or yellow skin, for example as the result of jaundice, a reference to the color of box wood.

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