Family name origins & meanings
- English : topographic name for someone who lived by a hill with a sharp point, from Old English pīc ‘point’, ‘hill’, which was a relatively common place name element.
- English : metonymic occupational name for a pike fisherman or nickname for a predatory individual, from Middle English pike.
- English : metonymic occupational name for a user of a pointed tool for breaking up the earth, Middle English pike. Compare Pick.
- English : metonymic occupational name for a medieval foot soldier who used a pike, a weapon consisting of a sharp pointed metal end on a long pole, Middle English pic (Old French pique, of Germanic origin).
- English : nickname for a tall, thin person, from a transferred sense of one of the above.
- English : from a Germanic personal name (derived from the root ‘sharp’, ‘pointed’), found in Middle English and Old French as Pic.
- English : nickname from Old French pic ‘woodpecker’, Latin picus. Compare Pye and Speight.
- Irish : in the south, of English origin; in Ulster a variant Anglicization of Gaelic Mac Péice (see McPeake).
- Americanized spelling of German Peik, from Middle Low German pēk ‘sharp, pointed tool or weapon’. Compare 4 above or from a Germanic personal name (see 6 above).
- John Pike brought his family to Boston from England in 1635 and settled in Newbury, MA. His son Robert was a leading citizen and a vigorous defender of civil and religious liberty in colonial MA.