Bah
A surname with several possible roots, including Germanic forms linked to place-names or old personal-name elements.
The #7,130 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 65,831 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The excerpts do not give a single secure explanation for Bah. One line of scholarship connects it with Germanic place-name elements like Bach/Bah, meaning a brook or stream, while another points to an old Germanic personal-name element sometimes written in forms like bah or bald. Because the surname is short and can arise from different spellings in different languages, it may have more than one independent origin.
History
The name is uncommon in the US and may reflect several unrelated immigrant spellings rather than one family line. In Germanic naming traditions, short surnames like this often arose either from local geography or from reduced forms of older given names. The historical excerpts are too fragmentary to tie Bah to a single region or family history with confidence.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
In older Germanic surname studies, forms like Bach and Beck are often grouped with words meaning a brook, showing how many surnames began as simple landscape labels.
From the historical record
“BACH (Ger.) Brook [M.H.Ger.bach, O.H.Ger. bah(h] Eng. Bach(e, i Batch, and lA.-Scfeind. Beck. BARRAUD (Fr.) see under Barpat(t' in Diet.”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)