Family name origins & meanings
- English and German : topographic name for someone who owned or lived by a meadow, or a metonymic occupational name for someone who made or sold hay, from Middle English gras, Middle High German gras ‘grass’, ‘pasture’, ‘grazing’.
- English : nickname for a stout man, from Anglo-Norman French gras ‘fat’, from Latin crassus (which was itself used as a Roman family name), with the initial changed under the influence of grossus (see Gross).
- Scottish : occupational name, reduced from Gaelic greusaiche ‘shoemaker’. A certain John Grasse alias Cordonar (Middle English cordewaner ‘shoemaker’) is recorded in Scotland in 1539.
- South German : nickname for an irascible man, from Middle High German graz ‘intense’, ‘angry’.