Are you called Longnose or Sheepshanks, Vuggles or Halfknight?

Whether one of the last remaining bearers of a rare surname, or just a Smith or Jones, most people have a curiosity about where their surname came from and how it evolved. My surname – Tickle, it turns out, comes from the place called Tickhill in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, and isn't quite as rare as you might think.

Thanks to an £835,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it's a curiosity that may soon be satisfied. The money is for a research project into UK family names to be launched in April at the University of the West of England (UWE), which will provide a publicly available, online database of the meanings and origins of up to 150,000 extant surnames.

Avid perusal of the database may confirm individuals' hopes of links to an aristocratic past; alternatively, UWE's researchers might pinpoint your name as having been given sometime in the Middle Ages to the local squire's favourite pig-keeper.

There are already various surname dictionaries, explains the principal investigator, Richard Coates (pictured right), professor of linguistics, but the question is whether previous researchers have made accurate interpretations of old forms of a name. "My current judgment is that often they haven't," he says. "Another major problem is where the suggested interpretation doesn't tie up with the known history of the families bearing it."

Though thousands of names are already known, in collaboration with lexicographer Dr Patrick Hanks, Coates and three researchers will want to find the ones that got away. They will soon be poring over old county rolls, medieval records and parish registers to find a sprinkling of names never before included in any database.

In order to build a profile for each name, information will be collected on the ways it was spelled, when and where it was first recorded, and its social and regional distribution, as well as its frequency.

At first, explains Coates, people simply didn't bother with surnames. "The need for surnames came from inherited wealth. You needed to be able to leave your money down the family line and make sure it went to the right Edward, Henry or William," he says. "That wealth was also taxable and the right Edward had to be taxed."

"There were far more given names in Anglo-Saxon England than in the 12th and 13th centuries. At the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, only the aristocracy have second names. As the number of given names reduces, so the need for distinctive second names grows."

Once the fashion for second names got started, aristocratic naming patterns filtered down to the lower classes relatively rapidly in most of England.

"For most of the country, surnames came during the late Middle Ages, and the trend spread from south to north," says Coates. "It's interesting that in certain regions, eg Lancashire and Wales, their widespread use is only seen much later."

There are, it turns out, four broad categories of surname. The first identifies someone by their relationship to other people. "This usually involves adopting the father's given name, giving rise to Jackson or Jacks or even just Jack; or Macdonald, in Gaelic Scotland," says Coates.

The second identifies a person by where they might be found; Hill or Green are examples, as is Coates's own name. "It literally means 'cottages' in Middle English. It is also applied as a place name, and in my family research, I discovered that Cotes is the name of a small place in my grandfather's ancestral county of Staffordshire, so that's probably where it comes from."

A third way surnames are formed is through description of a person, often relating to hair or skin tone: for example White, Short, Armstrong or Russell.

Finally comes occupation, with names such as Naylor (a nail maker), Leech (a doctor), Wheelwright (a wheel maker), Baxter (initially denoting a female baker) and Frobisher (a polisher). Sadly, Coates says the funniest name he's come across is unsuitable for publication in a family newspaper.

Decoding how names changed as people moved from place to place, and with different styles of spelling, will be part of the task facing the research team. Nor is it the case, says Coates, that women have always taken their husbands' names.

"Then there's the question of illegitimacy. In one sense it wouldn't matter what an illegitimate child were called if there was nothing to inherit, but, if you and your mother were abandoned, an identifying surname would be crucial to establish which parish was responsible for paying to look after you."

The most academically demanding part of the research will be interpreting the oldest names, and working out which language they were first formulated in: Norman French, Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, English, Dutch, German and Yiddish could all be sources. "The background assumption is that language change is regular," says Coates."So when you collect evidence and interpret one name, you can be reasonably confident you will see the same patterns in other words and names in the same language."

The bonanza moment in this type of research, he says, is when you realise you have gathered enough information to make a judgment that's never been reached on how a particular name came about.

Are there some surnames whose origins the team won't manage to work out?

Coates grins. "Undoubtedly some will be uninterpretable. If we can explain every name with more than 100 bearers we'll be happy. If we can explain lots with less than 100, we'll be very happy indeed."

Lickerish by name?

The names below all had up to 200 bearers in 1881. It is not known how many, if any, are still in use today.

Bolus Old Norse for 'poleaxe'

Champflower From a village in NormandyGwatkin Apparently a Welsh-influenced form of Watkin 'little Walter', from the Herefordshire area

Halfknight Maybe one who held half a knight's fee, or maybe just abusive

Lickerish 'Randy'

Marmion Old French for 'monkey'

McCambridge Anglicised Gaelic for 'son of Ambrose'

Pitchfork Rare variant of Pitchford, place in Shropshire

Prettyjohn Variant of Prester John, a fabled oriental ruler of the 12th century

Puddifoot 'Fat vat'

Slorance Scots, of uncertain ­meaning

Stiddolph From the Old English 'hard', 'wolf'