Gentile
A surname from a Latin word meaning “member of a clan” or, later, “non-Jewish” in medieval Latin and Romance use.
The #2,436 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 20,759 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Gentile comes from Latin gentilis, meaning “of the same family, clan, or people,” from gens, “tribe” or “people.” In classical Roman usage it could refer to the shared family name of a Roman gens; in later Latin and Christian usage it also came to mean “foreign” or “non-Jewish,” which influenced medieval and modern Romance forms. As a surname in Italian, Gentile is commonly understood as a nickname or descriptive name from the adjective gentile, “kind, noble, courteous,” though the Latin-family-name sense also lies behind the word’s history.
History
The surname is especially associated with Italy and the Italian diaspora, where it has been common for centuries. The excerpts show older writers using “gentile name” in the Roman sense of a clan name and noting how such names spread through patronage and manumission in Roman and Romanized societies. As a modern surname, Gentile is widespread enough in the United States to be familiar but still distinctly Italian in character.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
In Roman naming, the gentile name was the hereditary family name that identified the wider clan, not the personal given name.
From the historical record
“where there were four names the last was the agnomen. Thus in the name Caius Julius Caesar, Caius was the praenomen, Julius the nomen proper, or gentile or family name, Caesar the cognomen. In the case of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the last name was the agnomen ; but cognomen was sometimes used for…”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)