[liamdgray]

What does Monster mean in Dutch? It means the same, right?

Once, I worked with a guy whose surname was Den Beste. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Dutch didn't have surnames until the occupying French did a census that required each person to have a surname. He said that, to mock the occupiers, many of the Dutch chose their new surnames sarcastically, as did his ancestors, whose name means "the best." He told me "but that is nothing. Another Dutch name means something like 'little pieces of poop.'" This article lists a few more such: https://netherlandsbynumbers.com/2013/06/05/14-dutch-surname...

Not to discount your point. There's a whole world, indeed!

[pasdutchie]

The Dutch word "monster" means "specimen" in English. This is actually of Latin origin, and plenty of English words come from the same latin root (monstrum) like "demonstrate".

Likely as not, though, the surname "Monster" just reflects a family origin in the Dutch town of Monster, near the coast southwest of The Hague.

[liamdgray]

Thanks for correcting me. Apparently, I was too quick to accept the first translation proposed by https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=nl&text=monster&op=tr...

And thanks to your Latin lesson, now I know that monster in English means specimen too! (I prefer to understand words in terms of their roots.)

[carlosjobim]

So if we extrapolate from that, his ancestors when immigrating to America probably had to put a "last name" on the immigration form, maybe being from the Dutch town Monster or even from the now German city Münster. So maybe they put "van der Monster" as their last name = "from Monster". Which later became just "Monster".

[liamdgray]

Indeed that is what I understood to be one of the most common origins of surnames in the Western world generally. Given that, it was the intentional sarcasm in surname choice among some Dutch families in occupied Netherlands, circa 1811, that I found novel, humorous, and interesting.

The Wikipedia entry on the person in question makes it clear that his parents were born in the Netherlands and already had the Monster surname there. But since a town there has that name, I'm happy to assume that the family took the name from the town, as is very common in the West, rather than by an intentionally sarcastic choice.