Where the Black name comes from

Black is a surname with more than one origin, and a family carrying it may be English, Scottish, Irish or French. In its English form it comes from the Middle English word blak, meaning the colour black. It began as a nickname and was later taken up as a surname. Black can also be a variant of Blake, which traces back to the Old English blāc, meaning pale.

Where the family was Scottish, Irish or French, the spelling is likely an Anglicised form. The same root shows up in Low German, where Black is a word for ink and descends from Old Saxon *blak. In the 2010 United States Census, Black ranked as the 174th most common surname, carried by 154,738 people.