Salesbury

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A Welsh family name, borne notably by William Salesbury, the sixteenth-century scholar who translated parts of the Bible ; a village in Lancashire in north-west England
2. Welsh family name associated with a sixteenth-century translator of the Bible ; a small village in Lancashire in north-west England
3. A surname of Welsh origin, famous through the scholar William Salesbury ; a hamlet in the English county of Lancashire

Etymology: William Salesbury, a sixteenth-century Welsh scholar, published a Welsh New Testament in 1567, and his work fed into the 1588 Welsh Bible that shaped the language for centuries. His surname is also the name of a village in Lancashire, England, near Blackburn. The village name is probably of Old English origin, though its exact meaning is uncertain. Families often took surnames from the places they came from, and the name apparently travelled with one family into Wales, where it came to be attached to a scholar who would give the Welsh language its Bible.