Moise
A surname usually derived from the biblical name Moses, through French and other European forms.
The #7,829 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 72,989 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Moise is generally understood as a surname taken from the given name Moses, especially through the French form Moïse/Moise. The underlying Hebrew name is traditionally explained as meaning something like “drawn out,” referring to the biblical story of Moses being drawn from the water. In surname use, it would originally have identified someone as “son of Moise/Moses” or as belonging to a family associated with that personal name.
History
English surname writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries commonly treated Moise as a French-derived form of Moses, and related spellings such as Moyse, Moises, and Mosse often appear in the same cluster. The name could enter Britain through French, Norman, or later Huguenot influence, and related forms also occur in Scottish and Irish records. Because the spelling was unstable, Moise may in some cases overlap with Moyse and other variants rather than representing a single fixed family line.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Older surname dictionaries often grouped Moise with a whole family of spellings built on Moses, showing how fluid surname spelling could be across languages.
From the historical record
“form of Moses, q.v. Cp. the French form Moise. MOSSER (Eng. and Scand.) = Moss i (q.v.) + the agent. sufF. -er. (Scand.) Bel. to Mosser (Cumberland),”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)