User-submitted Reference

According to what I heard from my father and other relatives, since I was child 30 and more years ago, Nemnom and all its variants mean short. My father and old people in the family say that their great grandfather Fares or even great great great great grandfather Raphael(in Lebanese-Arabic accents pronounced Roophael/Rouphael), who belonged to the Khoueiri/Khoueiry family was a short person;because of this people used to nickname him in Lebanese Arabic: Namnoum/Namnoom, menamnam, which mean short, the short guy, the short height man. So they took their popular nickname as their official registered surname, with different pronunciations. I remember very well when I was 9-10 years old, 33 years ago that the first time they heard our paternal surname at school we were registered Numnum, variant that was also used in books, magazines, etc that were printed out in my late uncles Nassif/Nasseef and Joseph's "Numnum Printing Press" (Matbaat Numnum/Noumnoum in Arabic). Lately we demand at school that our family name would be written Nemnom;and because my father was (1982-2010) the mukhtar/moukhtar (Arabic for chosen, a local administrative post as mayor) of the Chiyah city in the southeastern suburbs of Beirut, we could probably beginning back then in 1982 convince all other paternal family members to change the Latin writing of our surname from Numnum, sometimes Noumnoum to Nemnom or Noumnoum, adding in Arabic sometimes the epithet Al or El which means "the".