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Look up shrive in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Shriver is a purely American English surname of German origin.
The surname may derive from the obsolescent common noun shriver, "a person who shrives". The English verb to shrive is an obsolete word referring to the act of confession (transitive or intransitive, confessor or penitent).[1]
However, the basic meaning of the Indo-European root that is the linguistic ancestor of shrive is the idea of writing, and it lives on in many other modern words, including English scribe and scrivener and German schreiben [to write]. Therefore, the surname Shriver may possibly have come from another occupation connected in some way with writing, such as clerk or secretary, and it could have arisen on the continent in an earlier form of spelling and pronunciation and been naturalised into English.
A number of notable people have the surname Shriver:
- Anthony Shriver
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009), sister of US President John F. Kennedy, wife of Sargent Shriver
- Lionel Shriver
- Loren Shriver
- Maria Shriver, American newscaster, wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver
- Mark Shriver
- Pam Shriver, American tennis player and sportscaster
- Robert Sargent Shriver III
- Sargent Shriver, American politician
- Timothy Shriver
References
- ^ executive editor, Joseph P. Pickett (2000), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4 ed.), Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 1614, ISBN 978-0-395-82517-4, headword shrive.
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This page or section lists people with the surname Shriver. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link. |
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