Summerville
A surname that likely began as a place name, and in some historical sources was also treated as a French-looking form of another surname.
The #6,861 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 62,945 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The name is best understood as a locational surname: it looks like an English place-name form built from summer plus ville, from Anglo-French and ultimately Latin villa, meaning a settlement, estate, or village. Harrison also links it to older forms connected with sumner/summoner, but the evidence in the excerpts is not fully clear, so that explanation should be treated cautiously. In practice, the surname may reflect either a place-based origin or later reshaping under French spelling influence.
History
The name appears in 19th- and early-20th-century surname dictionaries, where it is sometimes treated as a variant or Frenchified spelling. The Woulfe excerpt shows it being used as an assimilated form of an Irish surname in some cases, which means individual families with this spelling may have different origins. Today it is uncommon but established in English-speaking countries.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
In older surname scholarship, Summerville was sometimes noted as a spelling that could mask a very different underlying Irish name in certain families.
From the historical record
“2 for Sumnepson, q.v. SUMMERVILLE = Somepville, q.v. SUMNER ] (A.-Fr.-Lat.) Summoner, Appa- SUMNOR \ ritor, Ecclesiastical-Court SUMPNErJ Officer [M.E. sumenor, som{p)nour, somonour, etc., A.-Fr. somenour, etc. i f. O.Fr. som(m)oner, to summon, Lat.”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)