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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • English : occupational name for a bookbinder, from Anglo-Norman French liur.
  • English : possibly a topographic name (recorded in 1332 as le Lyghere) for someone who lived in a woodland clearing, from a derivative of Old English lēah ‘woodland clearing’.
  • German : short form of a Germanic personal name formed with liut ‘people’, ‘tribe’ + hari ‘army’.
  • German : possibly a topographic name formed with the element lir ‘swamp’, ‘bog’, or a habitational name from Lier, named with this word.
  • Dutch : habitational name from Lier, in the Belgian province of Antwerp.
  • Norwegian : habitational name from any of numerous farmsteads named with the indefinite plural form of li ‘mountain slope’, ‘hillside’ (see Li 4).

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