Old French names

Old French is the medieval French spoken across northern France from roughly the 9th to the 14th centuries. It grew out of the Latin of Roman Gaul and later became modern French. Its influence on English is hard to overstate. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French-speaking rulers governed England for generations, and thousands of French words entered the language, along with a new stock of personal names. This page covers names that reached English in their Old French form. The separate French page covers the living language as it is spoken now, and the Norman French tag marks the particular dialect the Normans carried across the Channel.

Several names now thought of as English arrived through Old French. Aubrey goes back to the Germanic Alberich, built from elements meaning elf and ruler, which the Normans brought to England as Auberi. Amy comes from the Old French amée, meaning beloved, itself a vernacular form of the Latin Amata. Alice descends from the Old French Aalis, a short form of the Germanic Adalheidis, whose first element means noble. Adeline and Adaline are French diminutives built on that same noble root. Allison began as a Norman French diminutive of Aalis, Alice with a small ending added, so it is not the English surname it resembles. Eleanor is the Old French form of the Occitan name Alienòr, carried to England by Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12th century, though its deeper root is uncertain.

Old French also gave English a set of occupational and descriptive words that became surnames and, later, first names. Bailey comes from the Middle English baili, meaning bailiff, a word English took from the Old French bailif. Mason means stoneworker, from an Old French word of Frankish origin. Archer is the bowman, an Old French term for the trade. Chase began as a nickname for a huntsman, from the Old French chacier, to hunt. Warren traces to the Norman French warrene, an animal enclosure, or to the town of La Varenne in Normandy. Names like these often carry Germanic or Latin roots, but each of them reached English through the French of the Normans. The Embrisa library gathers this range, from Aubrey, Amy, Alice, Adaline, Adeline, Allison, and Eleanor to Bailey, Mason, Archer, Chase, and Warren.