AMY LITCHFIELD

Anglicized form of Old French Amee ‘beloved’. This originated in part as a vernacular nickname, in part as a form of Latin Amata. The latter is ostensibly the feminine form of the past participle of amare ‘to love’, but in fact it may have had a different, pre-Roman, origin; it was borne in classical mythology by the wife of King Latinus, whose daughter Lavinia married Aeneas and (according to the story in the Aeneid) became the mother of the Roman people.

English: 1. habitational name from Lichfield in Staffordshire. The first element preserves a British name recorded as Letocetum during the Romano-British period. This means ‘gray wood’, from words which are the ancestors of Welsh llŵyd ‘gray’ and coed ‘wood’. By the Old English period this had been reduced to Licced, and the element feld ‘pasture’, ‘open country’was added to describe a patch of cleared land within the ancient wood. 2. habitational name from Litchfield in Hampshire, recorded in Domesday Book as Liveselle. This is probably from an Old English hlīf ‘shelter’ + Old English scylf ‘shelf’, ‘ledge’. The subsequent transformation of the place name may be the result of folk etymological association with Old English hlið, hlid ‘slope’ + feld ‘open country’.