A Scottish name from ‘burn’, a stream — the same root as poet Robert Burns — carried into Ulster with Plantation settlers.
Scottish Origin · Root meaning ‘stream, brook’
Burns is a Scottish topographic surname, taken from burn, the Scots word for a stream, and given to a family who lived beside one. It arrived in Ulster with Scottish Plantation settlement in the early 1600s.
A name for a stream rather than a sept, no different in kind from an Irish family named for the rock or the hollow beside their own door.
Irish form: (no Gaelic form)
