A variant of Kendall, an English place and surname meaning 'valley of the River Kent.'
Kendel is a phonetic variant of Kendall, a name with deep roots in the English landscape. It derives from the market town of Kendal in Cumbria, in the Lake District of northwest England, whose own name comes from the Old Norse Kirkby Kendal — 'church settlement in the valley of the River Kent.' The Kent River itself takes its name from the ancient Brythonic Celtic, making Kendel a name that layers Norse, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon history into a single syllable cluster.
As a surname-turned-given-name, Kendall followed the well-worn path of English topographic names entering the first-name pool during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a practice common in both Britain and America where family surnames were recycled as given names to preserve maternal or notable family lines. By the twentieth century, Kendall and its variants had fully crossed over into standalone first-name use on both sides of the Atlantic. The Kendel spelling, trimming the final double-l into a single l, gives the name a slightly more streamlined, contemporary feel — less like a place, more like a person.
It hovers in the gender-neutral space that many parents now seek, historically leaning masculine but increasingly given to girls and anyone in between. In an era when surnames-as-first-names have returned to high fashion, Kendel carries its landscape etymology lightly, wearing the Cumbrian hills as a quiet inheritance.