Where the Wallace name comes from

Wallace is a Scottish surname that began as the Anglo-Norman French Waleis, a word for a Welshman. Behind it stands Old Low Franconian *Walhisk, meaning foreigner, Celt or Roman, with a cognate in Old English carrying the same sense. In Scotland the name probably marked someone from the former Kingdom of Strathclyde, where people spoke Cumbric, a close relative of Welsh, though it could also point to an incomer from Wales or the Welsh Marches. Strathclyde belonged to the Hen Ogledd, and its people spoke a Brittonic language distinct from both Scottish Gaelic and Scots.

The surname settled out of an Old English byname, a descriptive tag hung on a Welshman or a Breton before family names were fixed. Its most famous bearer is the Scottish patriot William Wallace. The name proved strong enough to travel in the other direction too, taken up as a male given name from the nineteenth century onward.