From the Norman place name Saint-Maur, meaning 'from Saint Maurus'; also linked to 'sea moor.'
Seymour traces its origins to the Norman French toponym *Saint-Maur*, a place in the Seine-Maritime region of Normandy. When Norman nobles arrived in England following the Conquest of 1066, many carried place-names as surnames, and Saint-Maur evolved through English mouths into Seymour. The name entered the aristocratic English surname pool and became a given name by the 19th century, riding the Victorian fashion for bestowing surnames — particularly grand, landed ones — upon sons as first names.
The Seymour family itself was one of Tudor England's most consequential dynasties. Jane Seymour became Henry VIII's third wife and the mother of Edward VI, while her brother Edward Seymour served as Lord Protector of England during the young king's minority. This historical prestige lent the name a patrician glow that survived for centuries.
D. Salinger's brilliant, tortured Seymour Glass — the eldest of the Glass family siblings, a poet and spiritual seeker whose shadow falls across much of Salinger's later work. In America, Seymour became a solidly middle-class given name through the 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular concentration in Jewish-American communities where it functioned as a sophisticated anglicization. It now sits in comfortable vintage territory — neither forgotten nor fashionable — carrying faint echoes of New York intellectualism, old money Anglophilia, and the bittersweet world of Salinger's fiction.