From Latin 'templum' meaning sacred place; originally a surname for temple dwellers.
Temple derives from the Latin templum, a sacred enclosure marked out by an augur — a consecrated space cut apart from the ordinary world. From its earliest Roman usage the word carried a sense of threshold, of ground set aside for something larger than daily life. It arrived in English through the Norman French, and became both a common noun and a surname, attaching most famously to the Knights Templar, whose London headquarters gave the Temple district of the city its name, still visible today in the Middle Temple and Inner Temple Inns of Court.
As a given name, Temple is indelibly associated with Shirley Temple, the child actress who became the most bankable star in Hollywood during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Her dimpled, indefatigable optimism made her a national comfort in a time of genuine hardship, and her name absorbed something of that association — bright, slightly golden, carrying the faint warmth of an era. But Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist and autism advocate, has given the name an entirely different and perhaps more lasting dimension: rigorous, original, one of the most distinctive public intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
As a given name Temple sits in the category of surnames-turned-first-names, a tradition particularly strong in American naming culture. It carries architectural gravity — you cannot say it without the word temple appearing in the mind — and a kind of secular spirituality that appeals to parents looking for something meaningful without religious specificity. It works for any gender, though it has historically leaned masculine as a surname-name and feminine when paired with Shirley Temple's cultural shadow.