Family name origins & meanings
- Jewish (Ashkenazic) : occupational name for a cantor in a synagogue, from Yiddish zinger ‘singer’.
- English : variant of Sanger 2, in fact a Middle English recoinage from the verb sing(en) ‘to sing’.
- German : variant of Sänger (see Sanger 1) in the sense of ‘poet’.
- Isaac Merrit Singer, inventor of the eponymous sewing machine, was born in 1811 in Pittstown, NY, the son of German immigrant Adam Reisinger. He had five wives and fathered 24 children. Singer, who incorporated his company as the Singer Manufacturing Company in 1864, left a fortune worth $13 million to his various heirs.