Croft
A topographic surname for someone who lived by or worked on a small enclosed field or pasture.
The #2,766 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 23,664 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Croft comes from Old English croft, meaning a small enclosed field, paddock, or pasture near a house. In surname use, it most often identified someone who lived at or beside such a plot. Some older writers also connected it with ideas of an enclosure or close, and later surname forms sometimes vary as Craft through dialect or spelling change.
History
The name is widespread in England and appears in many place-names, which helped generate both local surnames and names taken from places called Croft. It was also attached to families associated with specific estates, such as Croft in Lancashire and Croft Castle in Herefordshire. Related forms include Allcroft, Bancroft, Meadowcroft, and the spelling variant Craft.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same root survives in many English place-names, and it has produced a surprisingly large family of surnames built with different prefixes, like Ashcroft and Bancroft.
From the historical record
“a village in co. Kirkcudbright. CROFT. Places in cos. Leicester, Lin- coln, York, Durham, and Hereford. Croft castle, in the first-named county, was the seat of an ancient family to which it gave name. 'CROFT. " Croft is a little close or pightle adjoining to an house, either used for pasture or arable, as the…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom