Burg
A surname from a word for a fortified place, castle, or town, especially in Germanic languages.
The #6,846 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 62,766 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Burg comes from a very old Germanic word meaning a fortified place, castle, stronghold, or walled town. In Old English and related languages, the same element appears in place-names and surnames such as Burgh, Bury, and borough. In some traditions it was also loosely linked with words for a hill, since many forts were built on high ground.
History
As a surname, Burg is usually topographic or locational: it could identify someone who lived near a fort, borough, or other defended settlement, or who came from a place named with this element. The same root is widespread across northern Europe, which is why related surnames and place-names appear in English, Dutch, and German records. Some 19th-century writers treated it as a broad place-name element rather than a single fixed surname origin.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same Burg root shows up in famous place-names like Edinburgh, Hamburg, and Luxembourg.
From the historical record
“Farnsworth, Wordsworth, Woodworth. BURG, BURY, a hill; Dutch, Berg, a mountain, a hill; now, a court, a castle, a town. From these words we have the names Kingsbury, Loundsbury, Waterbury, Salisbury, Eosenburg or Kosenbury. TRE, TREF, Welsh, a town, Coventry, the town of the Convent ; Trelawny, Tremayne. The…”
— An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names