Thornton (surname)

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Thornton is a surname found in Ireland and Britain.

Overview[]

Found in Britain as an English and Scottish surname derived from places so named in Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Fife, Merseyside, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, London, Pembrokeshire, Yorkshire. Its basic form denotes a settlement ('tun') of some sort beside a thorn tree or hedge of thorns [1].

In Ireland, it is an Anglicised form of a number of Gaelic-Irish surnames which have nothing to do with the British placenames. "[Thornton] is a portmanteau English name for Ó Droighneáin, Mac Sceacháin, Ó Toráin. The connection is: draighean, blackthorn; sceach, whitethorn; tor, a bush. MacLysaght remarks that some Thorntons in Limerick were 16 cent planters." [2]. Ó Droighneáin remains in use as an Irish-language surname.

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