Hargreaves

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An English family name of northern origin, borne by the eighteenth-century inventor of the spinning jenny
2. A surname common in northern England, famously carried by James, the weaver who devised the spinning jenny
3. The family name of a northern English lineage, notably that of the 1700s inventor who built the spinning jenny

Etymology: In 1768, a mob attacked the home of James Hargreaves, a Lancashire weaver, after spinners blamed his new spinning machine for threatening their livelihoods. He had moved to Nottingham to work on the device, which let one worker spin several threads at once. He patented the "spinning jenny" in 1770, and it became a central tool of the early textile industry. As a surname, the name is a place-name type, most likely from Old English elements meaning "grey" or "hoar" and "grove" or "thicket." Families took such names from the places where they lived, so the first bearers probably lived by a grey wood. Several northern English settlements have similar names, but the exact origin of any one family's name is uncertain.