Family name origins & meanings
- English and Irish : apparently a topographic name from Middle English furlong ‘length of a field’ (from Old English furh ‘furrow’ + lang ‘long’), the technical term for the block of strips owned by several different persons which formed the unit of cultivation in the medieval open-field system of farming, or a habitational name from a minor place named with this word, such as Furlong in Devon or Shropshire. The surname is now chiefly common in Ireland, where a family of this name settled at the end of the 13th century.
- Possibly an Americanized form of French Ferland.