Re: The origin of the surname Bondy
in reply to a message by Jim Young
Hey thank you! Could you find anything for me on Gopnik? I think it used to be spelled Gopnick, and it's Russian I believe... someone told me it meant something like "hoodlum" in Russian. This is a great website by the way, I've been curious about my family's names for a long time! Thanks for the work you're doing here...
Replies
Your informant appears to have been correct. Translations from the Russian I've turned up are "street robber", "criminal" and "bad boy". But this seems to be a fairly modern word, or meaning of the word. Gopnik is a letter for letter transliteration from the Cyrillic, Gopnick an English language spelling.