Patterson: the surname's root, sound and line

Root

son of "patter" — root not confirmed

The root itself we could not confirm. We will not invent one.

Suffix

-son — son of.

Sound

3 syllables · hard

Three syllables — a phrase. A name with time to say something about itself. A hard entry: the first sound strikes, then the name lets go. Stops dominate: this is the phonetics of action, not description.

Letters

Sitting whole inside: son

Built from these letters: reason · stone · atone · star · past · step · rest · near

Against the corpus

Harder than 75% of the 315 surnames in the corpus. Longer than 70% of them: 3 syllables.

Arithmetic over our own corpus, not an opinion: every number here can be recomputed from the string itself.

A letter with a history

Inside this surname stands T. Taw was the last letter of the Phoenician alphabet and it was drawn as a cross — the mark someone who could not write put instead of a signature. The whole story of this letter →

Nearby

Formed the same way: son of.

• Adams — man, made of earth
• Anderson — from Andrew — manly
• Andrews — son of
• Barnes — son of
• Brooks — a brook
• Burns — son of

Surnames ending in -son · All English surnames

Shadow

A way of being through action: do first, explain after.