Stokes surname meaning

Stokes is an English habitational surname, chiefly treated as a variant of Stoke. Place-names with Old English stoc or related forms could refer to a settlement, an outlying farm, or another dependent place, and several localities could independently produce the surname. The final -s does not necessarily mean “son of Stoke”; surname references describe it as a plural or later excrescent ending. Stoakes and Stoke preserve related spellings. Place is the catalog type, with high confidence in the connection to Stoke localities, although a specific family still needs records to identify which one.