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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • Dutch and German : from Low German kamp ‘enclosed, fenced, or hedged piece of land’, ‘field’ (from Latin campus ‘plain’), hence a topographic name for someone who lived by a field.
  • Dutch : from Middle Low German kampe ‘warrior’, ‘combatant’, applied as a nickname or an occupational name, or from a Germanic personal name based on this element. Compare German Kampe, Kampf.
  • Dutch : metonymic occupational name for a hemp grower, from Middle Dutch kanep ‘hemp’.
  • South German : from the Austrian dialect word Kamp ‘comb’, hence a metonymic occupational name for a comb maker or a wool comber, or a topographic name for a mountain dweller, from the same word in the sense ‘mountain ridge’. Compare Kamm.

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