Trumbull

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A town in Connecticut and a county in Ohio named after a colonial governor ; a family name borne by the American painter John Trumbull
2. A place name for a Connecticut town and an Ohio county honoring an early American governor ; a surname associated with the revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull
3. The name of a Connecticut town and an Ohio county, derived from a colonial governor ; a surname shared by the painter John Trumbull and other notable people

Etymology: Trumbull is best known as the name of a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and as a surname that the town's name likely shares. The surname is thought to be a variant of "Trumble," an English family name, though the source behind that link is thin and the exact route from the English name to the Connecticut town is not documented in the available record. Because the place name is a proper noun, its meaning is not a dictionary sense in the usual way. The town took its name from a person rather than from an English word for an object or quality, which means the useful question is which family the name came from, not what the letters mean. Beyond that link to a surname, nothing reliable can be said about the word's deeper linguistic history.