English surname originally denoting someone who lived near a grove or served as a steward.
Graves as a surname derives from the Old English "grǣfe" or the Old French "grave," referring to a grove of trees or, in some regional dialects, to a pit or ditch. The occupational or locational surname attached to families living near woodland groves or, more grimly, to those whose trade involved earthworks. As a given name it belongs to the fashion — particularly robust in the American South and among families with strong genealogical pride — of honoring a distinguished maternal surname by placing it first.
The name's most towering literary association belongs to Robert Graves (1895–1985), the English poet, novelist, and classical scholar whose output was staggeringly diverse: the autobiographical "Goodbye to All That" (1929) remains one of the great memoirs of the First World War; "I, Claudius" (1934) reinvented the historical novel; and his mythographic study "The White Goddess" (1948) exercised a profound influence on twentieth-century poetry and neo-pagan thought. Graves lived most of his adult life in Deià, Majorca, and conducted his creative life with an eccentricity and productivity that made him one of the defining literary personalities of his century. The surname also connects to Michael Graves, the postmodern architect, and to the Graves disease named for Irish physician Robert James Graves.
As a given name Graves carries an undeniable literary weight alongside a certain severity of sound — one hard syllable with a long vowel that seems to land with deliberate authority. It is the kind of name that feels willed rather than inherited, chosen by parents who want their child's name to announce something about the family's intellectual values. Unusual enough to prompt a second glance, familiar enough as a word and name that it never bewilders.