Last name Diamond?

Question:My friend's last name is Diamond and she says that she is half Greek and half Italian, but Diamond does not sound like a Greek or Italian surname. Where does this last name come from?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: My friend's last name is Diamond and she says that she is half Greek and half Italian, but Diamond does not sound like a Greek or Italian surname. Where does this last name come from?

You assume a name tells the whole story. But most of us who've been around family research long enough know that names have changed and mutated through the years. People may rush to tell you that it's clearly a Jewish name because so many Jews have that as a surname. But it doesn't take into account that many Italians and Greeks have "Anglicized" their names after immigrating so that they blend in to the new culture better.

It could have been Diamante, Dionysius or any of a hundred other Latin or Greek names 75 years ago. Changing the surname, though, doesn't change her heritage. If she tells you that she is Greek and Italian, I believe her. Know one can second guess family heritage from the spelling of a name...especially not in the US where so many immigrants couldn't spell to start with and were perfectly free to make their names easier for their friends and family to spell and pronounce.

It can be a variety of things ranging from Jewish to African-American.

There are quite a few Jewish people with that last name. Many Jewish people are in the diamond trade and work with jewelry.

It doesn't sound Greek or Italian but could have been changed from something else. It's a common Jewish name but not exclusively. John Thomas "Legs" Diamond, a notorious gangster of the 1920s, was Catholic and of Irish ancestry and Diamond was his real name (contrary to some erroneous published accounts that call him Nolan or Noland).

My guess is South African by Germany or Holland

The right answer is that a persons name and their ancestry are NOT always the same thing. IE.. her father may well have been the child of a Greek man/ Italian woman, but adopted by a step parent, whose name was Diamond.
ancestry has several origins possible for the name-
diamond

1. Jewish (Ashkenazic): Americanized form of a Jewish surname, spelled in various ways, derived from modern German Diamant, Demant ‘diamond’, or Yiddish dime(n)t, going back to Middle High German diemant (via Latin from Greek adamas ‘unconquerable’, genitive adamantos, a reference to the hardness of the stone). The name is mostly ornamental, one of the many Ashkenazic surnames based on mineral names, though in some cases it may have been adopted by a jeweler.
2. English: variant of Dayman (see Day). Forms with the excrescent d are not found before the 17th century; they are at least in part the result of folk etymology.
3. Irish: Anglicized form of Gaelic ó Diamáin ‘descendant of Diamán’, earlier Díomá or Déamán, a diminutive of Díoma, itself a pet form of Diarmaid (see McDermott).

So? where is the discrepancy? The ONLY way to be certain, would be for your friend to research her ancestry. There can be a number of reasons for what seems like a contradiction. One of them might also be that she believes herself to be Greek/ Italian based on misunderstanding of how genealogy works. She may not be of that heritage at all.
Separate the name from the person, and use research to clarify the facts.