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Last name origins & meanings:

  1. English: nickname for a gray-haired man, from Middle English grice, gris ‘gray’ (Old French gris, apparently of Germanic origin, and probably a distant cognate of Gray 1).
  2. English: from Middle English grice, grise ‘pig’ (Old Norse gríss, probably akin to 1), hence a metonymic occupational name for a swineherd or a nickname.
  3. English: Possibly an Americanized spelling of German Greis.