Samwell is an English variant of Samuel, from Hebrew meaning name of God or God has heard.
Samwell is an archaic English form of Samuel, the Hebrew name Shemu'el, which most scholars interpret as 'God has heard' (from shama, to hear, and El, God), though a minority reading holds it means 'name of God.' Samuel himself is one of the towering figures of the Hebrew Bible — the last of the great judges, the anointer of Saul and David, and the prophet who mediated between a nomadic tribal confederacy and the institution of kingship. His story in the Books of Samuel is one of the earliest explorations of political legitimacy in world literature.
The medieval English spelling 'Samwell' appears in parish records and legal documents from roughly the 13th through 17th centuries, a time when orthographic standards were loose and local scribal habits produced charming variation. It is phonetically identical to Samuel in most historical English dialects — the final syllable simply records a different convention for rendering the unstressed vowel. The spelling fell into disuse as standardization took hold, surviving mainly as a surname form.
R. Martin, whose character Samwell Tarly in A Song of Ice and Fire (and HBO's Game of Thrones) gave the old spelling an entirely new emotional register. Samwell Tarly — bookish, kind, and unexpectedly courageous — reframed the name as a badge of intellectual valor over physical bravado, making it appealing to a generation of parents who saw that arc as aspirational. The spelling's slight antiquity now reads not as an error but as a deliberate nod to a richer past.