Copes Last Name: Meaning and Heraldic Roots

Whether you spell it Copes or Cope, the story begins in the same place. Its meaning, shared with Cope, is “cloak”.

• Census takers and immigration officers often wrote what they heard.
• The Census Bureau's 2010 surname file lists Copes with 1,898 bearers, at rank 15,434. It sits within the 25,000 most common last names in the country.
• Related forms: Coape.
• The extra ending in Copes is patronymic: it identified a person as belonging to Cope's family.

Arms associated with the name

A coat of arms belongs to a particular family line rather than to everyone named Copes, so the heraldry linked to Cope is a starting point, not an automatic right. Get the complete Copes report, with a museum-style coat of arms.