Shockley

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An American physicist and Nobel laureate who co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 and later founded a semiconductor company
2. The surname of a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist known for co-inventing the transistor and pioneering silicon-based electronics
3. A family name borne by William Bradford Shockley, the physicist who helped invent the transistor and shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics

Etymology: Shockley is a surname, and the word is "shockley" as a noun in the sense of a person's surname or the name of someone bearing it. The likeliest origin is a habitational name taken from the village of Shocklach in Cheshere, England, a place name that combines Old English "sċucca", meaning goblin, evil spirit or demon, with "læcc", meaning boggy stream. So the name roughly describes a place where demons were thought to haunt a marshy watercourse. Habitational surnames like this were common in medieval England, when people were often identified by the village they came from. Over time the place name hardened into a family name that could travel far from Cheshire. The source treats this as a probable rather than certain derivation, so the goblin-haunted stream is best read as a plausible reconstruction of the original sense rather than a settled fact.