Evelyn Waugh's great-great-grandfather was born into a Berwickshire farming family at East Gordon on 16 August 1754, and the surname he handed down means, at its root, foreigner.
That is not an insult buried in the etymology but political geography, from a period when the Borders sat between three languages.
Why Does Waugh Mean Foreigner?
Because of who was doing the naming. The Oxford-backed surname dictionaries call Waugh a Scottish nickname from Middle English wale, a foreigner or Briton, in a form preserving the final consonant of Anglian Old English walh. The entry then explains the politics: the word was "applied by the Northumbrians to Strathclyde Britons in the same way that Gaelic Gall was applied by Highlanders to Lowlanders."
So English-speaking Northumbrians gave the name to the Brittonic-speaking people of Strathclyde, whose fortress was Dumbarton Rock, the ground covered in our history of the Lennox country. The same root gave English the word Welsh and sits underneath the surname Wallace: Wallace and Waugh are cousins in meaning, two ways of calling somebody a Briton.
That is a strange thing to find in a Border name. Frontier surnames usually record a farm, a tower or a father. This one records a language boundary.
How Is Waugh Pronounced?
Usually "waw", to rhyme with law, in England and America. In Scotland the older sound keeps the throat in it, closer to "wawch", with the consonant that ends loch. The Scots pronunciation is the conservative one.
Where Are the Waughs From?
The Borders, and the numbers support it. The 1901 census index counted 1,744 Waughs in Scotland, ranked 462nd. More telling is the modern density: roughly one Scot in 2,771 carries the name, against one in 10,254 in England and one in 24,098 in the United States. America has more Waughs in raw numbers, but per head the name is thickest in Scotland.
Within Scotland the weight sits in the south. You will see it repeated that the Waughs of Help in Roxburghshire held those lands from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth; the surname dictionaries consulted here do not carry it, so treat it as a lead rather than a pedigree. Border names with firmer paperwork include Eccles and the rare Buglass.
Waugh is not a riding surname. It is absent from the standard rolls in our account of the reivers who became the Scots-Irish; a Waugh was likelier farming beside the trouble than making it, like the Hoggs of Ettrick.
Who Was Alexander Waugh of East Gordon?
The most consequential Waugh of the eighteenth century, and almost unknown in Scotland today. Born at East Gordon on 16 August 1754 into a long-settled farming family, he went to school at Earlston and then to Edinburgh University from 1770 to 1773. Licensed to preach in 1779, he moved permanently to London in 1782, took the Secession Church in Wells Street and stayed for life. On 22 September 1795 he was among the founders of the London Missionary Society, chairing its examining committee for twenty-eight years, and he supported the Anti-Slavery Society. He died in London on 14 December 1827.
The literary tail is what surprises people. He was the great-grandfather of Arthur Waugh, the publisher who ran Chapman and Hall, whose sons were the novelists Alec and Evelyn Waugh. A Berwickshire Secession pulpit stands three generations behind Brideshead Revisited, in a county whose families often reach that far, as our history of the Ainslies shows.
Which Waugh Named the Highest Mountain?
Andrew Scott Waugh, against the wishes of the man he named it for. Born on 3 February 1810, son of General Gilbert Waugh, he studied in Edinburgh, entered Addiscombe Military Seminary in 1827 and reached India in 1829. He joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey under George Everest in 1832, and Everest named him his preferred successor on retiring in 1843.
In 1852 the survey's computations showed Peak XV to be the highest mountain yet measured. Waugh checked the figures, published in 1856 and proposed naming it for Everest, who objected that local names existed and that his own could not be written in Hindi. The Royal Geographical Society adopted Mount Everest anyway. The height came out at exactly 29,000 feet and was published as 29,002 so it would not look like a rounded guess, which earned Waugh the joke that he was the first man to put two feet on top of it.
How Do You Trace a Waugh Family?
- Search Waugh, Waughe, Wauch, Walch and Wach together. The spelling follows the sound, and the sound has a consonant clerks disliked.
- Start in Roxburghshire, Berwickshire and Dumfriesshire, then follow industry north to Edinburgh and west to Lanarkshire.
- Do not skip the Secession and Relief congregations. ScotlandsPeople now carries records from 262 congregations that left the Church of Scotland.
- Follow the emigrants. Waugh is common in the United States, Canada, Australia and Jamaica, and a Border line that stops abruptly has usually sailed rather than died out.
- Move from a statutory certificate into the older registers with our step-by-step guide to ScotlandsPeople.
Own a Piece of Waugh Heritage
A Northumbrian word for the Britons of Strathclyde became a Border farming name, then a London pulpit, then a mountain's christening. The Waugh designs run to a mug, a garden flag and a framed ornament, the family crest raised above a tartan ground. This is an old Border surname and not a clan, and nobody ever assigned it a weave, so the cloth is a design choice; our piece on what the tartan conventions require explains the difference.
Waugh Family Heritage Garden Banner
Common Questions About the Waugh Surname
What does the surname Waugh mean?
Foreigner, and specifically a Briton, from Middle English wale and Anglian Old English walh, the word Northumbrians used for the Britons of Strathclyde.
Is Waugh Scottish or English?
The dictionaries call it Scottish. The word is Old English, but that is the point: English speakers coined it about their British-speaking neighbors, and it took root in the Borders.
Is there a Clan Waugh?
None has ever been constituted. Waugh is a Border surname of long standing with nothing chiefly attached to it, which is a different thing from being obscure.
Was Evelyn Waugh Scottish?
Not in his own generation, but his male line runs back to Berwickshire through his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Waugh of East Gordon.
Sources and Further Reading
- Geneanet: Waugh — the Oxford entry, with the Strathclyde Britons and the Gall comparison.
- Waugh in the 1901 Scottish census — 1,744 bearers, ranked 462nd.
- Forebears: Waugh — the incidence figures behind the density comparison, and the Roxburghshire claim.
- Alexander Waugh, 1754 to 1827 — East Gordon and the London Missionary Society.
- Arthur Waugh — confirms Alexander as his great-grandfather and Alec and Evelyn as his sons.
- Andrew Scott Waugh — the survey, the 1852 computation and the naming of Everest.
- Waugh as a surname — the pronunciation note and bearers worldwide.
- ScotlandsPeople — National Records of Scotland registers and the breakaway congregation records.
Few surnames carry a frontier inside them; this one has said for a thousand years that the family came from the other side of a language line. The Waugh range is here.