- Means someone who was from Scotland
- Popular as both a first name and as a surname
- Known for the expression “Great Scott!” (as seen in the Back to the Future movies)
- Famous people with this name include musician Scott Joplin, actor Scott Bakula, and authors F Scott Fitzgerald & Scott Turow
History of the name Scott
This surname is ethnic in origin and indicates “the man from Scotland.”
As the tendency of the North Britons to “come south” is proverbial, there is no cause of surprise in the fact that this is most frequent of geographical surnames in British nomenclature. Nearly 60 coats-of-arms have been assigned to those that bear the name.
There are many of the name in Scotland, due in part to ancestors who gained the name abroad and returned with it, and in part to those who for various reasons may have assumed or been given the name.
The name in early records is almost always le Scot. Now the double “t” form prevails everywhere.
The Duke of Buccleuch is the head of the surname in Scotland. His pedigree runs back to Richard le Scot, of Murdieston, Lanarkshire, one of the Scottish barons that took the oath of fealty to Edward I of England in 1296.
One of the earlier Dukes of Buccleuch sought for a Norman origin of his name and pretended to have found it in the borrowed Old French Escot.
Until nearly the close of the tenth century, the term Scotia or Scotland always was applied to a part of the lowlands lying north of the Firth of Forth. By the thirteenth century, the name extended so as to include the whole of the kingdom.
So the Old Irish Scott, plural Scuit, means “Irish;” and in Adamnan, Scotia is “Ireland” and Scoti the “Irish.”
