Where the Ford name comes from

Ford began as a topographic name in Old English and Middle English for someone who lived beside a ford. In other families it came from a place already called Ford, among them villages in Northumberland, Shropshire and West Sussex, and Forde in Dorset. Early instances of the surname run from de la forda in the eleventh century and æt Fordan in the twelfth to de la Forthe in the thirteenth and Foorde and de Furd in the fifteenth. In some families it is instead a translated form of the German Fürth.

Ford also stands in for three unrelated Irish surnames. Mac Giolla na Naomh and Mac Conshámha, borne by septs centred in Connacht, were anglicised this way because their final syllable was once wrongly taken for the Irish áth, meaning ford. The third, Ó Fuartháin, belonged to a sept in County Cork and comes from the personal name Fuartháin, built on the Irish fuar, cold, which was misread as fuarathán, a cold little ford.