Where the Davis name comes from

Davis is Welsh, and most often it means son of David. David is Hebrew for beloved, from a root that first meant to boil and survives only in the figurative sense of loving. Dafydd, the Welsh form, turns up as a given name in the 13th century, carried by Dafydd ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales. There is a second and stranger possibility, that Davis is a worn-down Dyfed, which was still in use as a surname in the 12th century by men such as Gwynfard Dyfed, born in 1175.