Family name origins & meanings
- Scottish or Irish : reduced form of McFall.
- English : topographic name for someone who lived by a waterfall, declivity, or forest clearing, Middle English fall (from Old English (ge)fall ‘a felling of trees’, Old Norse fall ‘forest clearing’).
- German : topographic name from Middle High German val ‘fall (of trees)’; in some cases ‘waterfall’ or ‘landslide’, or a habitational name from a minor place named with this word, or in Tyrol from Ladine val ‘valley’.
- African : unexplained.