Taylor: the surname's root, sound and line

Root

taylor — one who cuts and sews cloth.

Old French tailleur, from tailler — to cut

Sound

3 syllables · flowing

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. Held sounds dominate: it flows rather than strikes.

The same root elsewhere

One trade, several languages that never met:

• Schneider de
• Кравець uk
• Szabó hu
• Krawczyk pl
• Sarto it
• Sastre es

Against the corpus

Harder than 50% of the 315 surnames in the corpus. Longer than 70% of them: 3 syllables. Marker “Many tongues”: 6% of the corpus carries it.

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 Y. French still calls it i grec, "the Greek i". The whole story of this letter →

Line

your root lives in 7 languages — you have seen none of them

Rare markers

• Many tongues

Nearby

Surnames that came from the same place in life — not the same root, but the same reason someone got named.

• Archer — a bowman
• Baker — one who bakes bread
• Barker — a tanner who stripped oak bark
• Baxter — a woman who baked
• Brewster — a woman who brewed
• Butler — keeper of the wine, a household officer

Surnames from a trade · All English surnames

Shadow

The work of one who cuts and sews cloth — done gently, not by force.