Origins

Hugh is a masculine given name

Given name

A given name, in Western contexts often referred to as a first name, is a personal name that specifies and differentiates between members of a group of individuals, especially in a family, all of whose members usually share the same family name...

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It comes from the subject case of the French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 name : Hugues, which is itself a refection from the Occitan. Regular French spelling is Hue (still kept as a French surname). It is of Germanic

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

 (Old Low Franconian) origin Hugo

Hugo (name)

Hugo is a surname and male given name of Germanic origin Hugo, meaning "Bright in Mind and Spirit" or "intelligence". The English spelling is Hugh....

, used as a common spelling across Europe. The spelling HuGH is probably from the Northern French (now Picard and Wallon) spelling Hughes for Hugues.

The Germanic name derives from the element hug meaning "heart", "mind", "spirit".

Hugh is also used as an Anglicisation

Anglicisation

Anglicisation, or anglicization , is the process of converting verbal or written elements of any other language into a form that is more comprehensible to an English speaker, or, more generally, of altering something such that it becomes English in form or character.The term most often refers to...

 of the Gaelic names Aodh and Ùisdean

Ùisdean

Ùisdean, sometimes also spelt Uisdean, is a Scottish Gaelic masculine given name. It is a borrowing of the Old Norse personal name Eysteinn, which is composed of the elements ey, ei, meaning "always", "forever"; and the element steinn, meaning "stone"...

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People named Hugh

Those for whom "Hugh" is the only or main identifying name are given under Hugh

Hugh

-Cypriot/Frankish/French:* Hugh I, Count of Angoulême * Hugh II, Count of Angoulême * Hugh III, Count of Angoulême * Hugh IV, Count of Angoulême...

. The remainder are too many to list here. See Special:PrefixIndex/Hugh.