Anglicized form of Irish Ó Taithligh, meaning 'quiet, peaceful one.' Also linked to Latin Tullius.
Tully carries two independent and equally distinguished etymological streams. In the classical Latin tradition, Tully is the familiar anglicization of *Tullius*, most famously the family name of Marcus Tullius Cicero — Rome's greatest orator, whose rhetorical genius shaped the Latin language for all subsequent Western writing. For centuries of European scholarship, calling Cicero simply "Tully" was standard; the name thus acquired associations with eloquence, philosophy, and the highest traditions of civic argument.
Ben Jonson and Shakespeare both used "Tully" in this way. The second stream is Irish. Tully is an anglicization of several distinct Gaelic surnames, most notably *Ó Maol Tuile* ("devotee of the flood" or "of God's will") and *Mac an Tuile* ("son of the flood/will"), clustered in Connacht and Leinster.
It also derives from *Tuathal*, an old Irish personal name meaning "ruler of the people," borne by early kings and saints. Irish-American families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sometimes passed Tully as a given name to honor this heritage when the surname had been lost or altered. In contemporary naming, Tully occupies a pleasing double position: it reads to classical scholars as a nod to Cicero's world, and to Irish-heritage families as a genuine piece of Gaelic identity. To everyone else, it sounds like a friendly, unpretentious two-syllable name with good energy — equally usable across genders, aging gracefully from childhood through adulthood.