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Surname Etymology and Meaning of BARR

Name meanings and etymologies are often disputed. The information here is compiled from freely available sources, and no claims whatsoever are made for accuracy, either historical or etymological.

(origin: Celtic. Local) The top or summit of any thing; any thing round. Bar, Gaelic, an old word for a bard or learned man. Bar, local, a bank of sand or earth, a shoal; the shore of the sea. It may be derived from Barre, a town in France, or from Barr, a parish and village in Ayrshire, Scotland.

Source: An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names With an Essay on their Derivation and Import (1857).

1. Scottish and northern Irish: habitational name from any of various places in southwestern Scotland, in particular Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, named with Gaelic barr ‘height’, ‘hill’ or a British cognate of this.
2. English: topographic name for someone who lived by a gateway or barrier, from Middle English, Old French barre ‘bar’, ‘obstruction’.
3. English (of Norman origin): habitational name from any of various places in northern France called Barre. See Barre.
4. English: habitational name from any of various places in England called Barr, for example Great Barr in the West Midlands, named with the Celtic element barro ‘height’, ‘hill’.
5. English: from the vocabulary word barr ‘bar’, ‘pole’, either a metonymic occupational name for a maker of bars, or perhaps a nickname for a tall, thin man.
6. Irish: from Ó Bairr, Donegal form of Ó Báire (see Barry 2).

Source: Dictionary of American Family Names (2003)