Family name origins & meanings
- English (mainly northern) : from Anglo-Norman French pel ‘stake’, ‘pole’ (Old French piel, from Latin palus), a nickname for a tall, thin man. It may also have been a topographic name for someone who lived by a stake fence or in a property defended by one, or a metonymic occupational name for a builder of such fences. Compare Pallister.
- Dutch : habitational name from places so called in North Brabant (where there is also a district called De Peel) and Dutch Limburg, from De Peel in Ravels, Antwerp province, or from Pedele in Kaggevinne and in Adorp, Brabant.
- German : possily a habitational name from a lost or unidentified place name.
- German : perhaps an altered spelling of Piel or Piehl.