Cleveland

Boy name variations

Family name origins & meanings

• English : regional name from the district around Middlesbrough named Cleveland ‘the land of the cliffs’, from the genitive plural (clifa) of Old English clif ‘bank’, ‘slope’ + land ‘land’.
• Americanized spelling of Norwegian Kleiveland or Kleveland, habitational names from any of five farmsteads in Agder and Vestlandet named with Old Norse kleif ‘rocky ascent’ or klefi ‘closet’ (an allusion to a hollow land formation) + land ‘land’.
• Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), 22nd and 24th president of the U.S., was the fifth child of a country Presbyterian clergyman. His father, Richard Falley Cleveland, a graduate of Yale College and of the theological seminary at Princeton, was descended from a certain Moses Cleaveland who arrived in MA in 1635.