Feist
A German surname originally used as a nickname for someone stout, plump, or fat.
The #8,681 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 81,592 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The name comes from German feist, meaning fat, stout, or fleshy. It began as a descriptive nickname and later became hereditary as a surname. Some older sources also note that it could be used as a byname in England for German families who settled there.
History
The surname is best attested in German-speaking areas, and older English surname books treat it as a borrowed German nickname rather than a native English name. It appears in Anglo-foreign contexts because German immigrants and their descendants sometimes retained the surname unchanged. In later centuries it also spread more widely through migration to North America and elsewhere.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Older surname dictionaries explicitly gloss Feist as meaning “fat,” a reminder that many surnames began as blunt medieval nicknames.
From the historical record
“local name. FEIST. German ; fat. Feste. H.R. FELBRIGGE. A parish in Norfolk, where tlie familv resided temp. Edward I. De Felbrigg, H.R. FEED. An old form of Field. FELIX. Happy : a latinization, or the personal name. |^°FELL. A component sjdlable in many”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom