Lockard
A Scottish surname tied to the ancient Lockhart/Locard family, with a possible place-name sense from Loch Ard in Scotland.
The #5,651 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 50,276 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The surname Lockard is generally treated as a variant of Lockhart/Locard, an old Scottish family name. One tradition connects it with Loch Ard, a lake name in Scotland, which would make it a locational surname. The broader Lock-/Locard- forms may also reflect later spelling shifts around the established Lockhart line rather than a wholly separate origin.
History
Historical sources place the Locard/Lockard family among the Scottish landholding families of the 12th and 13th centuries, with figures such as Stephen and Simon Locard appearing in early records. Later spellings vary widely, and Lockard shows up as one of the forms associated with this old Scottish surname tradition. In the 19th-century literature, it is often treated as a variant of Lockhart rather than an independent surname branch.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
A 19th-century etymologist explicitly glossed Lockard as referring to Loch Ard, a scenic body of water near Ben Lomond.
From the historical record
“LOCK. See Locke. LOCKARD. Loch-Ard, a beautiful sheet of water near Ben Lomond in Scot- land. LOCKE. 1 . A place where rivers meet with a partial obstruction from a wooden dam. 2. The same as Loch. LOCKE. The Scandinavian god of mis- chief—the Evil Principle of the Northern mythology— was called Lok, and the name…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom