Family name origins & meanings
- German : metonymic occupational name for a maker or seller of cups or flasks, from Middle High German kopf ‘flask’ (from Late Latin cuppa ‘cask’).
- German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : nickname for someone with some noticeable peculiarity or deformity of the head, from Middle High German kopf (the same word as in 1, used in a transferred sense which during the Middle Ages gradually ousted the earlier word houbet ‘head’), German Kopf.