Grieves Surname: Origin, Meaning & Coat of Arms

Search old registers for Grieves and you will soon meet Grieve too. At root, the name means “Farm overseer”. The extra ending in Grieves is patronymic: it identified a person as belonging to Grieve's family. Regional accents shaped spellings long before dictionaries fixed them. Other spellings include Greive.

According to the 2010 US Census, the Grieves surname had 849 bearers. Grieves sounds close to Greaves, Graves and Groves, so it can help to search both.

A coat of arms belongs to a particular family line rather than to everyone named Grieves, so the heraldry linked to Grieve is a starting point, not an automatic right. Research your Grieves family history with a full surname report and painted coat of arms.