Family name origins & meanings
- English (mainly Devon and Cornwall) : nickname from Norman French buge ‘mouth’ (Late Latin bucca), applied either to someone with a large or misshapen mouth or to someone who made excessive use of his mouth, i.e. a garrulous, indiscreet, or gluttonous person. The word is also recorded in Middle English in the sense ‘victuals supplied for retainers on a military campaign’, and the surname may therefore also have arisen as a metonymic occupational name for a medieval quartermaster.
- Scottish (Caithness and Orkney) : unexplained.