Tutt
A short English surname that likely began as a pet form of an old Germanic personal name.
The #8,277 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 77,090 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The surname Tutt is usually treated as a shortened or reduced form of an old Germanic personal name, especially the Anglo-Saxon names Tudda or Dudda. Older surname scholars connected it with a family of related forms such as Tuttle, Tutty, Tidy, Tedd, and similar spellings built on the same ancient name-stock. In this view, the literal sense is not entirely clear today, but the name itself goes back to early personal-name forms rather than to an occupation or place.
History
19th-century surname writers recorded Tutt alongside Tuttle and Tutty as English family names descended from old personal names. The form appears in English records and later spread to North America, where it remains uncommon. Because these names were often spelled many ways, Tutt can overlap historically with several related surnames.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Older onomastic books grouped Tutt with a whole cluster of vowel-shifting spellings, showing how fluid surnames could be before spelling became standardized.
From the historical record
“TUTTLE TUTT \ (Eng.) the A.-Sax. pers. name Tut{a, TUTTE J TM(a [prob. conn, with the O.Teut. Thiuda-,Thiot{a- names : see underTheed] TUXBURY for Tewkesbury, q.v. TUXFORD (Scand. -f Eng.) Bel. to Tuxford (Notts), i3th-i4th cent.r«fe5/orrf=TuKE's or Toke's Ford [v. Toke, and-l-O.E./ord]”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)