My last name is Shirts. I know people whose last names are: Woods, Wool, Tie, Silver, Gold, Bond, and I'm sure I could identify a 100 more friends and acquaintances whose last names are nouns.
A long time ago someone told me there was a word that means a person whose last name is a noun. I would like to know that word so when I meet another person whose last name is a noun I could bond with them by saying,"Oh, your name is also a ....." Then we could share all the bad jokes that people have made about our names.
In high school I was called, "pants" "sweat" "dirty" "t" "underwear." "Sh*ts" and "shorts"
If there isn't such a word, maybe we should create one. Any suggestions.
I don't know of a word that means precisely what you describe. But I think that the term for family names that come from a person's trade, feature, or home (e.g. Smith, Fletcher, Cooper, Frank, Toth, Engle, Little, Grand, Brown, Testarossa) is Cognomen. Perhaps that concept could be extended slightly to include the result of linguistic coincidences that produce family names that match common nouns.
I knew someone whose family name was Dick. Cognomen? Many thought so.
I thought cognomen was a nickname or a stage name. I didn't know it applied to a person's trade. If it does, that's very close to the word I misremembered. Thanks glenn.
Garry
There is a relationship between the meamings. Such family names were historically a form of a nickname or attributive epithet:
Robert Miller was the man named Robert who was the miller.
At one time, my (data-processing) shop had employees named Snapp, Branch and Link. (For those not in the programming biz, these are all words that crop up daily in that profession.)
My father was a plumber, but our surname comes from a Gaelic word having something to do with songbirds.