Hillis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A family name of English origin carried by many people across several generations and countries
2. A surname possibly derived from an old word for hill, shared by numerous individuals in English-speaking lands
3. A proper name used as a family name, borne by a wide range of people in the English-speaking world

Etymology: Hillis is a surname that is simply a variant of Hills or Hillhouse, so its story is really the story of those two names. Hills comes from the Old English "hyll", meaning a hill or rise of ground, and the name would have been given to someone who lived by or on a slope, or who was known for living in a particular hilly place. The "-is" ending is a spelling variation in which the plural-looking form took on a separate life as a family name, the way many English surnames were fixed in writing long after the people who first bore them had died. Hillhouse, the other parent name, was a locational name for a house on a hill, and it reflects the same habit of naming people after the land they held or lived beside. Both forms belong to a large group of English surnames built from landscape words, which were often recorded in variable spellings by clerks and parish registers before any standard spelling existed.