Boardman
An English surname that originally referred to a cottager or bordar, though some later sources also explained it as a boarding-house keeper.
The #5,823 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 51,995 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The older and better-attested explanation connects Boardman with Middle English bordar or boardman, meaning a cottager or small tenant who held land in return for service. The word ultimately goes back through Old French bordier and related medieval Latin forms used for that class of unfree or semi-free tenant. A later alternative explanation treated the name as if it meant a person who keeps a boarding-house, but that looks like a secondary reinterpretation rather than the original surname sense.
History
The name is found in English records as a social-status surname, like many medieval occupational and tenure-based names. It is especially associated with northern and eastern English surname tradition, where bordar-related forms were common. Later, the spelling Bordman also appears as a variant. Some 19th-century writers proposed the boarding-house explanation, but genealogical dictionaries usually prefer the older tenancy sense.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
This surname reflects a medieval class of tenant rather than the modern word board in the sense of food or lodging.
From the historical record
“BOARDER. A cottager. See Borde. BOARDMAN. A cottager. See Borde. BOASE. Perhaps the same as BoAves. BOAST. Berhajjs a corruption of some local name like Bowhurst. Some thirty years ago, a worthy possessor of this name, while dressing one winter morning, ivrotc it with his fingernail upon a frosted pane of his win-…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom