Family name origins & meanings
- Irish (Sligo and Munster) : Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Beólláin ‘descendant of Beóllán’, an old Irish name of uncertain origin.
- English : habitational name from any of various places such as Bowland in Lancashire and West Yorkshire, Bowlands in East Yorkshire, and Bolland in Devon. All of these are most probably named with Old English boga ‘bow’ (in the sense of a bend in a river) + land ‘land’.
- German : of uncertain origin; possibly from Slavic polan ‘rural person’, ‘peasant’, or a variant of Bolander, or an altered spelling of Böhland, a name of Slavic origin, from Old Slavic belu ‘white’, a descriptive nickname for a fair-haired person.