Where the Carter name comes from

Carter is a job, and the job is driving the cart that moved the goods. The word runs back through the Anglo-Norman careter to the Latin carettarius, and behind that to the Celtic cairt, cart, which is still a live word in Gaelic. Further back again it is the Proto-Indo-European kart, a wheeled vehicle, so the idea inside the name is about as old as ideas get.

The earliest English record is Rannulf le Caretier, in the Huntingdonshire Pipe Rolls of 1192, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart. Not every Carter came that way. The Irish name is Mac Artuir, son of Arthur, and a great many American Carters were McCarters until a clerk at the port or the family itself dropped the Mc.