Where the Coleman name comes from

Coleman comes from two unrelated roots, one Irish and one English. The Irish line runs back to Ó Colmáin, Ó Clumhain and Mac Colmáin, patronymic forms built on the given name Colmán, so the surname began as a way of saying whose son a man was. The English line is occupational and describes a burner of charcoal, the coal man who tended the smouldering stacks and sold what came out of them. A second English reading takes it as the name of a servant of a man called Cole.