From Old Norse 'Þórsteinn' meaning Thor's stone, combining the thunder god with rock.
Thurston descends from the Old Norse Þórsteinn, a compound of Þór — the hammer-wielding thunder god whose name persists in Thursday — and steinn, meaning stone. The Norse invaders and settlers who poured into northern and eastern England from the ninth century onward brought the name with them; it became Thorstein in its raw form and was gradually anglicized through the medieval period into Thurstan and then Thurston. A village in Suffolk bears the name, testimony to the Scandinavian settlement of the Danelaw, and numerous medieval English records show the name in use among men of Norman-Scandinavian lineage through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
As a surname, Thurston's most recognizable association in popular culture may be Thurston Howell III, the comically pompous millionaire of the television series Gilligan's Island, whose patrician New England manner and exaggerated wealth gave the name an ironic aristocratic quality in mid-century American consciousness. More substantively, the name belongs to a line of American usage as a transferred surname — Thurston B. Morton, the Kentucky senator and Republican National Committee chairman of the 1950s and 1960s, is one example of the surname in public life.
Thurston Moore, the co-founder of Sonic Youth, gave the name a very different register: downtown avant-garde, deliberately unpretentious. Today Thurston reads as a vintage American name with genuine Norse backbone — the kind of choice that rewards those who look up its etymology, since "Thor's stone" is about as mythologically solid a foundation as a name can have. It fits naturally among other Scandinavian-derived names experiencing quiet revival — Thorvald, Sven, Gunnar — while being Anglo-enough that it requires no explanation in English-speaking countries.