Family name origins & meanings
- German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : topographic name from Middle High German brache ‘fallow land’, ‘pastureland’, originally ‘newly plowed land’.
- Jewish (Ashkenazic) : variant of Barach.
- English : topographic name from Middle English breche, Old English brǣc ‘newly cultivated land’ (a derivative of brecan ‘to break’, i.e. ‘land broken by the plow’), or a habitational name from any of the places named with this element, as for example Brache in Luton, Bedfordshire, and Breach in Maulden, Bedfordshire.