A modern English-style creation likely built from Martin, from Latin Martinus, meaning 'of Mars.'
Martrell is a name rooted in the resonant tradition of African-American creative naming, where inherited European surnames are transformed into given names carrying new identity and intention. Its most direct ancestor is Martel or Martell, from Old French meaning "hammer" — a word that rose to legendary status through Charles Martel (688–741 CE), the Frankish military leader whose victory at the Battle of Tours halted the northward advance of the Umayyad forces into Western Europe.
"The Hammer" became one of medieval history's most vivid epithets, and the surname Martell carried that martial strength through centuries of French and later English usage. In African-American naming tradition, particularly flourishing from the mid-twentieth century onward, surnames like Martell were taken up as given names and given new phonetic elaboration — the addition of "-rell" or "-ell" endings creating a melodic extension that transformed a blunt surname into something lyrical. This practice of elaboration reflects a sophisticated cultural creativity: the same impulse that produced Darnell, Terrell, Carnell, and Donnell also produced Martrell, a name that sounds simultaneously ancient and thoroughly contemporary.
Martrell carries the double inheritance of its roots: the hammer-strength of its Frankish etymology and the cultural agency of the African-American naming tradition that reshaped it. For those who bear the name, it is both received and invented — a common paradox in names, but one that Martrell embodies with particular clarity.