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Japanese Montgomery is not in the Bible. It is a Norman French place name meaning “Gumarich’s mountain,” and it came to Britain with the Norman Conquest as the surname of Roger de Montgomery. It has no Hebrew root and no connection to Gomer, the Bible name it resembles.
What does the name Montgomery mean?
The name began as a place in Normandy, in what is now the Calvados department of France. Its first part is the French mont, “mountain” or “hill.” The second is Gumarich, also written Gomeric, a Germanic personal name made from words meaning “man” and “ruler.”
Roger de Montgomery, from Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery in the Pays d’Auge, inherited his father’s lands in Normandy in 1055 and by 1066 was one of the principal counsellors of William the Conqueror. After the conquest of England, William gave him nearly all of what is now West Sussex and, about 1071, most of Shropshire, and Roger became Earl of Shrewsbury. He founded Shrewsbury Abbey in 1083 and died in 1094. William also gave him land on the Welsh border, and the town that grew up around the castle there took his name. It became the county town of Montgomeryshire. Its Welsh name, Trefaldwyn, means “the town of Baldwin.”
A Montgomery family moved from Wales to Scotland in the twelfth century and became Clan Montgomery, a clan of the Scottish Lowlands. Whether it descends directly from Roger’s family is disputed.
Is Montgomery a Hebrew or Jewish name?
No. Montgomery does not occur in the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek text of Scripture or in any translation, and it is not among the names in the Bible. It is not Hebrew or Jewish in origin. It is a French place name that became a British surname.
Some name sites say Montgomery means “Gomer’s hill,” after Gomer the grandson of Noah (Genesis 10:2) or Gomer the wife of the prophet Hosea (Hosea 1:3), but name dictionaries trace the name to the Germanic Gumarich, and the likeness to Gomer is only one of sound.
Montgomery as a surname and a first name
The best-known bearer of the surname is Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976), the British field marshal who led the Eighth Army to victory at El Alamein in 1942 and was later made Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. His family was the County Donegal branch of Clan Montgomery. His father, Henry Montgomery, was a Church of Ireland priest and later Bishop of Tasmania. The Canadian author L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942) published Anne of Green Gables in 1908.
As a first name Montgomery is uncommon, and its usual short form is Monty. In the United States it entered the 1,000 most common names for boys in scattered years of the 1880s and 1890s, in most years from 1960 to 1968, and again in 2025, when it ranked 960th. In England and Wales it ranked 578th in 2025.
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