Boy name origins & meanings
- Old English : Forester; row of houses by a wood
Family name origins & meanings
- English : occupational name for a forester employed to look after the trees and game in a forest, Middle English woodward (from the Old English elements mentioned at 2).
- English : perhaps also from an Old English personal name Wuduweard, composed of the elements wudu ‘wood’ + weard ‘guardian’, ‘protector’.
- English : Henry Woodward emigrated from England in 1635 and settled first in Dorchester, MA, and subsequently in Northampton, MA. He had many prominent descendants. Another Henry Woodward, born about 1646 in the British West Indies, was the first English settler in SC (1664).