Variant of Wendell, from the Germanic tribal name Vandal or Wend, meaning wanderer.
Wendall is a variant spelling of Wendell, a name whose roots reach into the migrations of early medieval Europe. The name derives from the Wends (also called Vandals or Wenden), a Slavic people who settled along the Baltic coast and whose name became associated in Old High German with the verb "wenden" — to wander, to turn, to journey. The Germanic form Wendel was already in use by the Carolingian period, worn by saints and nobles alike, and it spread westward as the Frankish world absorbed the names of its neighbors.
Saint Wendelin of Trier, a seventh-century Irish or Scottish pilgrim monk who settled in the Saarland and became the patron saint of shepherds and farmers, gave the name enduring religious currency in German-speaking lands. His rustic piety — he reportedly tended flocks in the Palatinate forest before his sanctity was recognized — ensured Wendel remained a village-level name throughout the medieval period, common among agricultural communities rather than courts. The name arrived in America via German and Dutch immigration, where it anglicized comfortably into Wendell.
, the towering Supreme Court Justice — gave the name considerable American prestige in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist orator, and Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee of 1940, reinforced its association with principled public life. The spelling "Wendall" is an Americanized variant that softens the Germanic edge while keeping the name's solid, dependable character intact.