Ard (surname)


Ard is a surname of Scottish origin. It is an anglicized variant of the original Scottish surname Aird.

Origins and variants

Ard is a habitational name from any of several places called Aird in Scotland, including a small hamlet near Hurlford in Ayrshire, a small village in the parish of Inch in the council area of Dumfries and Galloway, and the Aird, a district in the Vale of Beauly near Inverness. These place names are derived from the Gaelic àird, which means "height", or "promontory", or from "àrd" which means "high", suggesting that the first to use the surname hailed from a location of high elevation.
The surname Ard was first found in the historic county of Ayrshire in southwest Scotland, and the ancient Strathclyde-Briton people of the region, which today consists of the Council Areas of South, East, and North Ayrshire in the present-day region of Strathclyde, were the first to use the name. The family likely came from the village near Hurlford in East Ayrshire, which would suggest that that location is likely the name's actual area of origin.
Until the gradual standardization of English spelling in the last few centuries, English lacked any comprehensive system of spelling. Medieval Scottish names, particularly as they were Anglicized from the original Gaelic, historically displayed wide variations in recorded spellings as scribes of the era spelled words according to how they sounded rather than any set of rules. This means that a person's name was often spelled several different ways over a lifetime. As such, different variations of the Ard surname usually have the same origin.

People with the surname