A male name. Celtic Drystan from Drest or Drust ‘tumult’, ‘din’. The form Tristan was influenced by French triste ‘sad’, and the Tristan romances give this as the derivation of the name. Tristan is found as a surname in France as early as the end of the 12th C. The christian name occurs in England from 1189 in the form Tristram, which was the usual one in England, though it was exceptional in France. The intermediate form Tristran is found in one of the earliest French Tristan romances. The surnames Tristram, Trustram, Triston are derived from it.

Tristram Curia Regis Rolls 1189-1215, Hundred Rolls 1273. Trystrem Yorks Poll Tax of West Riding of Yorkshire 1379 1379. Tristian Lyford 1655.

‘A herald’ from Celtic, says Charlotte Yonge, equating it to Trwst (q. v.); she continues, ‘The influence of Latin upon Welsh, however, made trist really mean sad (L. tristis, French triste)...; and Tristram, or sad face, became identified with the notion of sorrow.’ Helena Swan subscribes to this transition in the meaning of Trist-, yet (and, mark you, she was no fool) she has defined the A. -S. Thurstan (of which Searle gives sixteen authentic examples) as ‘Thor’s stone’ (or ‘jewel’) and derived it from the Norse Thor stein: it is this ‘Thor’ etymology which Professor Weekley supports. Cf. therefore Thorold, Thorburn, and Thurlow. Though now rare in English,—it is fairly vigorous in French as Tristan,—it still conveys something of the glamour attaching to that pre-Arthurian, and Arthurian, hero of romance who is a central figure in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in Matthew Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult, and in Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (i. e. Brittany).

From the Old German treist-ram, strong in boldness (treist, dreist, bold).

A Celtic name, meaning: A herald. (Latin) Sorrowful: grave.