Recorded in a number of spellings including Lipscomb, Lipscombe, Lipscome, Lipsom, Lipson, Lypson and possibly others, this is an English locational surname. It is almost certainly from a now "lost" village, one of an estimated five thousand such places which have (usually) totally disappeared from the maps of the British Isles over the past five centuries, and which gave rise to surnames. Because the original place no longer existed and because few could read and write but many had local accents which were often so thick as to be a foreign language to someone from a different part of the country, surnames often adopted a "sounds like" spelling as nameholders moved about. This name probably started life in the county of Devonshire and near the city of Plymouth. It is known that a place called Lipson once existed in that area, and this place it seems in even eralier times was known as Lipscomb. However it do not exist in either spelling by the year 1880 when the Victorian etymologist Canon Charles Bardsley carried out some research. Surviving examples of recordings taken from church registers include Roger Lipson who married Agnes Bull at the church of St Mary at Hill in the city of London in 1575, whilst a century later William Lipscomb married Frances Gundey at Canterbury Cathedral in 1673.

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