Bloomfield
A habitational surname meaning “someone from the bloom- or flower-field.”
The #5,833 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 52,083 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Bloomfield is a habitational surname formed from place-names built with the Old English elements blōma or blōm, meaning a bloom or blossom, and feld, meaning open land or field. In practice, surnames like this usually meant a person came from a place called Bloomfield or from a field known by that name. Some later writers also noted possible local origins from specific villages in Worcestershire and Cumberland, but the name was already understood mainly as a place-name surname.
History
19th-century surname writers associated Bloomfield chiefly with Norfolk, while also allowing that a few families may have taken the name directly from places called Bloomfield in Worcestershire and Cumberland. The related spelling Blomfield is historically common, and the name is part of a wider English pattern of surnames formed from landscape terms. Later commentators treated Bloomfield as a fairly regularized modern spelling of older place-name forms.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Writer Weekley noted that some surnames ending in -field became standardized by association with a known place-name, helping fix spellings like Bloomfield.
From the historical record
“Norfolk • (Pair. Brit p. 3a). Oddly enough he does not recognize Bloomfield as a corruption. He says, ' Bloomficld, 1 village in co. Wore., and probably other locali- ties. Norfolk has long been the greatest habilal of the name ' (ibid. p. 3[\ Of course Bloomfield in”
— A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, with special American instances