Family name origins & meanings
- English : habitational name from a place in Devon, recorded in Domesday Book as Loba, apparently a topographical term meaning perhaps ‘lump’, ‘hill’, the village being situated at the bottom of a hill. There is also a place of the same name in Oxfordshire (recorded in 1208 as Lobbe), but the historical and contemporary distribution of the surname (which is still largely restricted to Devon), makes it unlikely that it ever derived from this place, or from Middle English, Old English lobbe ‘spider’.