Meaning & Origin
A Scottish surname transferred from the given name, that of a clan.
Sinclair is a girl's and boy's baby name of French origin (also used as a boy's name), from the Norman-French surname de Saint-Clair, meaning 'from Saint-Clair' — a place name honoring Saint Clarus, from the Latin clarus (bright, clear, famous).
Sinclair carries the heritage of the powerful Norman de St. Clair family, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England in 1066 and became the Scottish Sinclair clan — builders of the mystical Rosslyn Chapel immortalized in The Da Vinci Code. As a given name, it has the clean, distinguished quality of a great surname name — literary (Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature), historic, and immediately distinctive.