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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • French : topographic name for someone who lived on a patch of stony soil or by a large outcrop of rock, from Old French pierre ‘stone’, ‘rock’ (Latin petra, from Greek), with the definite article la, or a habitational name from various places named Lapierre or La Pierre, with the same meaning. It may also have been a metonymic occupational name for a quarryman or stone carver. In the U.S. it is often translated as Stone.

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