English
The surname Norman is of English origin. It was a name applied either to a Scandinavian settler or to someone from Normandy in Northern France. The Scandinavian adventurers of the Dark Ages called themselves 'noromenn', men from the north. When they settled in England and Northern France the term was adopted by the local population as 'Norpmann' and 'Norman( t )' respectively. The pre-Conquest Scandinavian settlers in England were fairly readily absorbed, and Normann came to be used as a byname and later as a personal name, even among the Saxon inhabitants. The word gained a new use when England was settled by invaders from Normandy, of Scandinavian origin but by now largely integrated with the native population and speaking a Romance language, retaining only their original Germanic name. It is also a Jewish name of uncertain origin; in at least one case it is an anglicized form of Novominsky, the name of a family from Uman in the Ukraine. On coming to the United States around 1900, a member of this family changed his name to Norman, after which some relatives in Russia adopted this name instead of Novominsky. To the Swedes this name is a cognate of North. The name dates back to the tenth century were a Normannus is recorded in historical archives. This name was brought to America predominately by English immigrants. One of the first fore fathers to bring this name to America is that of a Richard Norman, formerly of Dorchester, England, who settled in America in 1626. This name is the three-hundredth and sixty-ninth most numerous surname in America.