Knox surname meaning

Knox points to a hill. Scottish and northern English lines come from Old English cnocc, a round-topped hill, or from Gaelic cnoc with the same sense; places named Knock—especially Knock in Renfrewshire—are cited as habitational sources. The two etymons are hard to separate in practice because they describe the same landscape feature. Knock is the transparent place-name twin; Americanized spellings of unrelated Jewish names sometimes look similar. Place is the clear type, and the hill meaning is agreed across surname dictionaries.