Hollis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A personal name of English origin, used as a first name or family name ; a small town in New Hampshire and Oklahoma among other American places
2. An English-origin name borne by people as a first or last name ; a place name given to several small American towns and communities
3. A given or family name of English origin ; the name of a few modest municipalities scattered across the United States

Etymology: Hollis is an English surname, and its story begins with a plant. It comes from the noun "holly," the evergreen with spiny leaves and red berries, and it belongs to a group of surnames that were given to people according to where they lived. A man who settled by a stand of holly trees could be known simply as the one by the holly, and over generations that descriptive phrase hardened into a family name. The same root also produced the surnames Hollen and Holley, which show how one plant name could spread into several forms. Hollis, with its final "-is," is the version that has come to be the most familiar, carried mostly as a personal name as well as a surname. Because surnames of this kind were fixed by where people lived, the name records a landscape as much as a family.