Styles
An English surname usually understood as meaning “son of Style” or “of the stile,” originally from a person’s location or family name.
The #5,113 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 45,092 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The surname is generally explained as a genitive or patronymic form of Style, with the final -s marking “of Style” or “Style’s.” In surname history, Style itself is often linked to a topographic word for a stile, a step or gate in a fence, so Styles may originally have meant someone living near a stile or descended from someone called Style. Older writers also treated it as a family-name pattern parallel to Brooks, Sykes, and Dykes, where the final -s marks descent or association.
History
Bardsley specifically grouped Styles with surnames that appear to preserve an older possessive or filial form, and Lower simply cross-referred Styles to Style. The name is well established in English records and later became familiar enough to appear in the stock phrase “Jack Noakes and Tom Styles.”
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Nineteenth-century surname writers often used Styles as a textbook example of how an older place-based name could take on a final -s and look like a plural.
From the historical record
“STYLEMAN = Style + E. man. STYLES, geuit;, and pi., of Style, q.v. STY(E)MAN = Stye (q.v.) + E. man. SUART = Seward, q.v. : cp. Stuart from Steward. The Yorks PoU-Tax, a.d. 1379, has as surnames both 5«ar/ and Sueherd. SUCH \ Q^.-Fr.-Lat.) Dweller by a Tree- SUCHE J Stump [Fr. souche; prob. f. the pp.,”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)