Guthrie

Boy name variations

Family name origins & meanings

• Scottish : habitational name from a place near Forfar, named in Gaelic with gaothair ‘windy place’ (a derivative of gaoth ‘wind’) + the locative suffix -ach.
• Possibly an Anglicized form of Scottish Gaelic Mag Uchtre ‘son of Uchtre’, a personal name of uncertain origin, perhaps akin to uchtlach ‘child’.
• Irish : adopted as an English equivalent of Gaelic Ó Fhlaithimh ‘descendant of Flaitheamh’, a byname meaning ‘prince’. This is the result of an erroneous association of the Gaelic name in the form Ó Fhlaithimh (Fh being silent), with the Gaelic word laithigh ‘mud’, and of mud with gutters, and an equally erroneous association of the Scottish surname Guthrie with the word ‘gutter’. Compare Laffey.
• Samuel Guthrie (1782–1848), who invented a replacement for the flintlock musket, also discovered chloroform in 1831. His ancestor John Guthrie came to North America from Edinburgh, Scotland, and died in Litchfield Co., CT, in 1730.