Wold
A surname for someone who lived by an open, treeless hill or upland ridge.
The #6,091 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 54,830 Americans shares it.
Etymology
This surname comes from Old English *w(e)ald*, meaning a wooded or wooded-then-cleared upland, later used more generally for an open hill, ridge, or high plain. In surname use, it originally described someone who lived near such a landscape feature. Some later writers glossed it simply as an “unwooded hill,” but the older English place-name sense is broader than that.
History
The name is well represented in English place-names and surnames built from them, and related forms such as Waud and Wold appear in medieval records. Because “wold” is also a common element in English geography, the surname may have arisen independently in several places rather than from one single family line. It is found in English-speaking countries today, especially where English surnames were carried overseas.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same old word survives in English place-names like the Cotswolds and in landscape descriptions of the chalk uplands of southern England.
From the historical record
“The Irish form of this name is Uagan. WOLD (Eng.) Dweller at the Wold lorig. a forest) [O.E. w(e)ald, a forest] Cp. Waud. WOLF 1 the anc. Teut. animal-name [O.E. WOLFE J wulf = O.Sax. wulf = O.H.Ger. wolf = L.Ger. (incl. the Anglian dialect spoken between Schle.'^wig and Flens-”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)