From the English place-name Romilly, often interpreted as “Roman clearing,” now used as a soft given name.
Romilly is a name of Norman French distinction, tracing its origins to the village of Romilly-sur-Andelle in Normandy, itself named from the Latin Romiliacum — a place associated with a Roman settler named Romilius. The Normans carried the name to England after 1066, where it settled into the aristocratic surname tradition before gradually making its way, centuries later, into use as a given name. There is something inherently elegant about Romilly: four syllables that move with the unhurried confidence of old money and older libraries.
The name's most distinguished bearer is Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818), the British legal reformer who dedicated his career to humanizing England's savage criminal code — a system that once permitted the death penalty for more than two hundred offenses. His passionate advocacy helped lay the groundwork for Victorian penal reform, and his name became synonymous with mercy as legal principle. To carry Romilly is, in this light, to carry a legacy of principled dissent.
In the twenty-first century, Romilly has found renewed life as a given name in Britain and, increasingly, in North America. It joins a cluster of names — Ptolemy, Rafferty, Araminta — that feel simultaneously old-fashioned and daringly fresh. Parents drawn to literary, slightly aristocratic names that bypass the overused classics often land here. It shortens naturally to Romy, a nickname with its own sparkle, making it practical as well as poetic.