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Updated March 26, 2024

Table of contents

Boy name origins & meanings

  • Latin : Dark-skinned; like a Moor
  • Latin : Dark-skinned
  • Hebrew : Drawn out of the water

How Popular Is The Name Moss

Family name origins & meanings

  • English and Welsh : from the personal name Moss, a Middle English vernacular form of the Biblical name Moses.
  • English and Scottish : topographic name for someone who lived by a peat bog, Middle English, Old English mos, or a habitational name from a place named with this word. (It was not until later that the vocabulary word came to denote the class of plants characteristic of a peat-bog habitat, under the influence of the related Old Norse word mosi.)
  • Americanized form of Moses or some other like-sounding Jewish surname.
  • Irish (Ulster) : part translation of Gaelic Ó Maolmhóna ‘descendant of Maolmhóna’, a personal name composed of the elements maol ‘servant’, ‘tonsured one’, ‘devotee’ + a second element which was assumed to be móin (genitive móna) ‘moorland’, ‘peat bog’.

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