Day

Variations – Daye, Dey, Deye, Dayman, and Deman
Racial Origin – English
Source – An occupation

The family name of Day is really traceable to several different sources.  One of these origins is a variation of the given name of David.  Another is Irish, when Day is a shortened form of the name of O’Day.

The third is English, and an occupation.

Older forms of the surname, in that period when surname were purely descriptive and had not yet become hereditary family distinctions, are met with constantly as “Le Deye,’ “Le Dagh,” and “Le Dayman.” Translated into modern speech, all of these names meant simply “the Dairyman” or the Dairymaid,” according to the sex of the person to whom the name was applied.

These family names therefore, take their place in the large classification of the original bearers, and which become hereditary at a slightly later period than surnames, which were derived from place names.  If you bear one of these names it might trace back in your particular case to the  twelfth century, or maybe only to the fifteenth or sixteenth, but hardly later than that, older forms of the name would have been different.