Family name origins & meanings
- English (mainly northeastern) : habitational name from places so called in County Durham and Northumberland. The former is named with an unattested Old English scēot ‘steep slope’ + Old English tūn ‘enclosure’, ‘settlement’, the latter with Old English scota, genitive plural of scot ‘Scot’ + dūn ‘hill’. The surname may also have been a topographic name for someone who lived by an enclosure on a slope.