Jowett

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A English surname, most famously borne by Benjamin Jowett, the nineteenth-century Oxford classicist and translator of Plato
2. A family name of English origin, best known through Benjamin Jowett, the Victorian Oxford scholar who translated Plato and Thucydides
3. An English surname, chiefly associated with Benjamin Jowett, the Balliol College master and influential nineteenth-century Greek scholar

Etymology: "Jowett" is an English family name, and the only etymological fact available about it is that it is a variant of "Jewett." That makes it a surname spelling variant rather than a word with a dictionary sense of its own, and the two forms are best understood as the same name recorded in different ways. Because surnames of this kind often arose as descriptions of a person or a place, and because spellings were not fixed until well into the modern period, one family name can appear with several spellings across records. "Jowett" and "Jewett" both belong to that pattern.