Where the White name comes from

White started as a remark about somebody's hair or complexion, from the Middle English white, and in some families from a personal name that meant the same. In Scotland and Ireland it is a translation rather than a nickname, standing in for Gaelic names built on ban or geal, both meaning fair, among them Mac Giolla bhain, O Gealagain and O Banain. The Irish de Faoite is different again, an Anglo-Norman name that Irish borrowed and English later took back as White. It is the seventeenth most common surname in England and has sat between fourteenth and twenty-second in the United States since 1990.