UNA TAYLOR

Anglicized form of Irish Úna. In Irish legend Úna is the mother of the hero Conn Cétchathach (Conn of the Hundred Battles). It was also the name of the beloved of the 17th-century poet Tomás Láidir Costello: banned by her parents from seeing him, Úna fell into a decline and died, leaving him to mourn her in his verse. The Anglicized form of the name is sometimes taken to be from the feminine of Latin unus ‘one’. It is the name used by Spenser for the lady of the Red Cross Knight in The Faerie Queene: he probably had Latin rather than Irish in mind, even though he worked in Ireland for a while. The Irish name has also been Anglicized as Unity, Juno, Winifred, and Agnes.

English and Scottish: occupational name for a tailor, from Old French tailleur (Late Latin taliator, from taliare ‘to cut’). The surname is extremely common in Britain and Ireland, and its numbers have been swelled by its adoption as an Americanized form of the numerous equivalent European names, most of which are also very common among Ashkenazic Jews, for example Schneider, Szabó, and Portnov.