Pye
A surname that may come either from the magpie bird nickname or, in some Welsh families, from Ap Hugh ('son of Hugh').
The #8,763 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 82,486 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The name has at least two traditional explanations. One is nickname-based: Middle English pye or pie meant a magpie, from Anglo-French and Latin roots, and was used for someone thought to resemble the bird in speech or manner. Another is Welsh: some bearers of Pye were apparently produced by the corruption of Ap Hugh into Pye. Because both explanations appear in the historical sources, the surname should be treated as having mixed origins.
History
The bird nickname was common in medieval surname formation, and historical records show early spellings such as Py(e) and Pyet alongside other bird-based names. In Wales, however, Pye could arise through the Anglicizing of Ap Hugh, which created a separate surname stream. The modern surname in Britain and the United States may therefore reflect more than one origin.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The older English word pye was the ordinary medieval name for the magpie; the modern word may-pie was later felt to be a compound and reshaped accordingly.
From the historical record
“PYATT. See Pyott. PYE. One of the many surnames de- rived from Hugh. Ap-Hugh lias, in some parts of Wales, been corrupted to Pye. See anecdote in Eng. Surn. i. 180. It may, however, sometimes be derived from the bird, now called the May-pie, the first syl- lable of which is a puerile addition, like Tom and Pv,obin…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom