Family name origins & meanings
- English : descriptive nickname for a giant or a large man, from Middle English golias ‘giant’, from the Hebrew personal name Golyat Goliath. In the Bible Goliath was the champion of the Philistines, who stood ‘six cubits and a span’; he was defeated in single combat by the shepherd boy David (I Samuel 17), who killed him with a stone from his sling. There is unlikely to be any connection with the English vocabulary word gully (from Old French goulet ‘neck of a bottle’), which is not attested in this sense before the 17th century.
- Perhaps an altered spelling of French Goulley, a variant of Goulet.