Family name origins & meanings
- English : nickname from Old French testard, a pejorative derivative of teste ‘head’ (see Testa).
- German : from Latin testa ‘head’, hence a nickname for someone with a large or otherwise remarkable head, or, especially in Bavaria, a topographic name for someone who lived at one end of a village or a row of fields, from the same word.
- German : metonymic occupational name for a silver smelter, from Bavarian test ‘furnace for refining silver’.