Sand
A surname that could point to sandy ground or a place-name built from the word sand.
The #6,974 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 64,188 Americans shares it.
Etymology
This surname is most plausibly from Old English sand, meaning "sand." In surname use, that typically points to someone who lived by sandy soil, a sandbank, or a place called from that feature. In some cases it may also be a shortened form of a longer local surname containing sand- as its first element.
History
The provided sources do not give a standalone dictionary entry for Sand itself, but they do show the element sand used in local surnames such as Sambrook and Sandbach. As a family name, Sand is uncommon in modern English-speaking countries and may arise independently in more than one place-name context. Because it is short and topographic, it may also have been used as an abbreviated or simplified form of longer surnames.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same Old English word sand appears in many English place-names, which is why surname forms built from it often overlap with local geography rather than a single ancestral line.
From the historical record
“SANDALLS. See Snndall. SAND BACH. A town in Clieshire. SANDER. See Alexander. SANDERCOCK. A diminutive of San- der, Alexander. See termination COCK. SANDERS. SANDERSON. The son of Alexander — Sander being the common nickname of that appellation.”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom