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Surname Etymology and Meaning of CROSS

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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: Local) A place where a cross was erected, or where two ways, roads, or streets intersected each other.

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

1. English: topographic name for someone who lived near a stone cross set up by the roadside or in a marketplace, from Old Norse kross (via Gaelic from Latin crux, genitive crucis), which in Middle English quickly and comprehensively displaced the Old English form cruc (see Crouch). In a few cases the surname may have been given originally to someone who lived by a crossroads, but this sense of the word seems to have been a comparatively late development. In other cases, the surname (and its European cognates) may have denoted someone who carried the cross in processions of the Christian Church, but in English at least the usual word for this sense was Crozier.
2. Irish: reduced form of McCrossen.
3. In North America this name has absorbed examples of cognate names from other languages, such as French Lacroix.

Source: Dictionary of American Family Names (2003)