Tenison

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An English family name, borne notably by Thomas Tenison, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury
2. A surname of English origin, best known through the Church of England archbishop Thomas Tenison in the late 1600s
3. A proper name of English origin used as a family name, most famously for a late seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury

Etymology: A "tenison" was a quarrel or contention, a word for strife between people. It came into English from Old French "tenson," meaning dispute or contest, which traces back to Latin "tensio," from "tendere," to stretch. The image is of two parties pulling against each other, as on a rope, so a dispute was imagined as a tug-of-war. The same Old French root gave Occitan poetry its "tenso," a debate poem in which two poets traded verses over a question of love or morality. English kept the sense of struggle, and the word stayed mainly in the vocabulary of medieval writing before it faded from common use.