English: habitational name from Barnes (on the Surrey bank of the Thames in London), named with Old English bere-ærn ‘barn, a storehouse for barley and other grain’, or a topographic name or metonymic occupational name for someone who lived by or worked at a barn or barns, from Middle English barn ‘barn, granary’.

English: variant of Barne, with excrescent -s, derived from either the Middle English personal name Bern, Barn (based on the Scandinavian personal name Biǫrn or Old English Beorn, both from a word meaning ‘warrior’), or from Middle English barn (Old Norse barn) ‘child’. The latter term is found as a byname for men of the upper classes; it might also have had the meaning ‘young man of a prominent family’, like Middle English child (see Child ).

Irish: in Ireland in many cases this is no doubt the English name, but in others it is possibly an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Bearáin ‘descendant of Bearán’, a byname meaning ‘spear’.