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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • Southern French : metonymic occupational name for a gardener or topographic name for someone who lived near an enclosed garden, Occitan ort (Latin hortus).
  • German : from a Germanic personal name Ort, a short form of the various compound names with the first element ord ‘point’ (of a sword, spear).
  • German : topographic name for someone who lived at the top of a hill or the end of a settlement, from Middle High German ort (see 2 above), in the transferred sense ‘tip’, ‘extremity’. In modern German the word has come to mean ‘point’, ‘spot’, ‘place’.

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