Where the Shaw name comes from

Shaw comes out of Old English roots meaning woodland or thicket. In England it worked as a topographic surname, attached to someone who lived beside a small wood or copse. The word stuck to the ground as well as to people, and villages and towns called Shaw stand in Berkshire, Wiltshire and West Yorkshire, with another in the Oldham borough of Greater Manchester.

A second Shaw has nothing to do with any of that, because it is also a romanization of the Chinese surname 邵. That name traces back to the Zhou dynasty and is believed to come from the royal lines, specifically from the Duke of Shao (召公), a loyal subject of the King. The same Chinese surname reaches Latin script in several other shapes, among them Shao, Siaw, Siew, Shiu, Siu and Sho. In Tagalog the surname arrived by a third road, borrowed from Hokkien 邵 (Siàu).