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Updated June 9, 2019

Boy name origins & meanings

  • Arabic : Lamb
  • Old English : Flat-topped hill

Family name origins & meanings

  • English, Scottish, and Irish : variant spelling of Hamill.
  • French : topographic name for someone who lived and worked at an outlying farm dependent on the main village, Old French hamel (a diminutive from a Germanic element cognate with Old English hām ‘homestead’).
  • German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) : habitational name from the city of Hamlin, German Hameln, Yiddish Haml, where the Hamel river empties into the Weser. The name of the river probably derives from the Germanic element ham ‘water meadow’.
  • Dutch : metonymic occupational name for a shepherd, from Middle Dutch hamel ‘wether’, ‘castrated ram’.
  • A Hamel from Normandy, France, is documented in St. Jean et St. François, Quebec, in 1666.

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