Family name origins & meanings
- English : metonymic occupational name for a grower or seller of fennel (Old English finugle, fenol, from Late Latin fenuculum). Fennel was widely used in the Middle Ages as a herb for seasoning. The surname may also have been a topographic name for someone who lived near a place where the herb grew or was grown.
- English : Reaney also identifies this as a derivative of Fitz Neal ‘son of Neal’, citing as an example Fennells Wood, a place name recorded in 1391 as Fenelgrove and named for a Robert FitzNeel (1283).
- Irish : reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Fionnghail ‘descendant of Fionnghal’, a personal name composed of the elements fionn ‘fair’, ‘white’ + gal ‘valor’.