Oscar Family History

English: de-aspirated variant of Hosker in a spelling that was no doubt influenced by the 18th-century personal name (see 3 below). Irish and Scottish: rare shortened form of Irish Mac Oscair (see McCusker) a patronymic based on the personal name Oscar which is most probably from Gaelic os ‘fawn deer’ + car- ‘love’. Alternatively it may be from a Gaelic borrowing of the Old Norse personal name Ásgeirr (from ans ‘god’ + geirr ‘spear’); see Hosker.

French: from the Irish and Scottish Gaelic personal name Oscar (see 2 above) which owed its popularity in France (and also in Germany and Scandinavia) to the Ossian poems of James MacPherson (1760) which enjoyed a great vogue in France and other parts of Europe in the late 18th century.

In North America this surname also originated from a transferred use of the personal (given) name Oscar (see 3 above) as a surname (i.e. as a replacement of the original surname) which occurred among some Norwegian and apparently also Swedish and German immigrants.