Corbet

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A family name of English origin, also borne by several villages and places in England
2. A surname traced to English and Norman origins, carried by many people across the English-speaking world
3. A proper name for a person or locality, notably a family surname of English origin

Etymology: "Corbet" is an English word for a carved ornamental bracket or corbel, the stone or wooden support that projects from a wall to carry a weight above it. It was borrowed from French, where the form "corbet" is a diminutive of "corbel", itself from "corbeau", meaning "raven" or "crow". The name is usually explained as a reference to the way such brackets jut out from a wall like a bird's beak or a crow perched on a ledge, though the literal picture is more a guess than a documented fact. The word is a close relative of its better-known sibling "corbel", which was borrowed into English from the same French source. Both come from the Latin "corvus", meaning "crow" or "raven", so the architectural term and the bird share one ancestor. Because the two forms came in separately, English keeps both, with "corbel" the more familiar of the pair today.