Lester

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A male given name of English origin often used to identify individuals in personal or formal contexts
2. A surname derived from an English place name, historically indicating someone from a specific geographic area
3. A proper noun commonly applied to persons or fictional characters, serving as both first and last designation in English-speaking regions

Etymology: Lester is a surname, and its most striking feature is that it names a place in several different ways. The most common route runs through Leicester, the English city, so bearers of the name were often identified by the town they or their families came from. The name is also tied to Normandy: a place called Lestre gave rise to a Norman surname, and that Norman place name is traced back to Old French Lestra and Medieval Latin Laxtra, which may come from "extera", meaning "exterior part of a property". The name did not stay in one place. In England and Scotland, Lester is also a variant of Lister, and in some cases a variant of Laster, so different families reached the same spelling by different paths. In Scotland and Ireland it can also be a shortened form of McLester, which shows how a longer patronymic could be cut down to a single word.