Where the Boyd name comes from

Boyd is an old Scottish surname with two competing explanations. The first traces it to Robert, son of Simon and grandson of Alan son of Flathald, who was called Boyt or Boyd from the Celtic boidhe, meaning fair or yellow. In Scottish Gaelic the word is buidhe, which also carries the sense of blond. Robert the Bruce granted lands to Sir Robert Boyd, the ancestor of the earls of Kilmarnock. That peerage ended after William Boyd rebelled at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and was executed at the Tower of London the same year.

The second explanation makes it a place name, taken from Bhoid, the Gaelic name for the island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde. The Scottish Gaelic form is Boid for men and Bhoid for women, and the name was common in Edinburgh in the 17th century. Boyd later passed into use as a given name, and the 2010 United States Census counted 153,469 people with the surname, making it the 176th most common in the country.