Family name origins & meanings
- German : possibly a topographic name from Biel ‘sloping rock’, or a habitational name from any of several places called Bielau, in Silesia, or Biehla in eastern Germany, or Biele on the Oder river.
- German : (Westphalia) topographic name for someone who lived by a field that had the shape of a hatchet, from Middle Low German bīl ‘hatchet’, ‘axe’.