Stokes — Irish Surname Origin & Meaning
Irish form: Stóc
Meaning: 'dweller at the outlying farmstead' (Old English stoc)
Traditional stronghold: Dublin, Sligo
Pronunciation: STOHKS
History of the Stokes name
Stokes is an English surname, from Old English stoc ('outlying farmstead'), present in Ireland since the fourteenth century and long naturalised. Its most remarkable flowering was intellectual: the Dublin Stokes dynasty produced generations of physicians and scholars, including William Stokes, whose name survives in Cheyne-Stokes respiration and Stokes-Adams syndrome, and the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes, a founding figure of early Irish studies; the Sligo-born mathematician George Gabriel Stokes gave physics Stokes' theorem and the Navier-Stokes equations. The name is also long established among the Irish Traveller community, making it common in Munster and the midlands. Few surnames in Ireland span so many worlds.
Variants: Stoakes · Stoke
Famous bearers of the name
- George Gabriel Stokes — Sligo-born mathematician and physicist, Lucasian professor at Cambridge for over 50 years.
- William Stokes — Great Dublin physician commemorated in Cheyne-Stokes respiration.
- Whitley Stokes — Pioneering editor and translator of early Irish texts.
Related names from the same part of Ireland: Byrne · McGowan · Boland · Casey · Higgins · Feeney · O'Dowd · O'Hara