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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • French : from Old French paper ‘to munch or eat’ (Late Latin pappare, in origin a nursery word); as a nickname its sense is uncertain, but possibly it referred to a glutton. The word papin also had the meaning ‘pap’, ‘pulp’.
  • Dutch : from a pet form of an old Germanic personal name, Papo.
  • A Papin from the Maine region of France is documented in Montreal in 1665.

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