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The hale Surname

hale Name Meaning and History

  1. English (also well established in South Wales): topographic name for someone who lived in a nook or hollow, from Old English and Middle English hale, dative of h(e)alh ‘nook’, ‘hollow’. In northern England the word often has a specialized meaning, denoting a piece of flat alluvial land by the side of a river, typically one deposited in a bend. In southeastern England it often referred to a patch of dry land in a fen. In some cases the surname may be a habitational name from any of the several places in England named with this fossilized inflected form, which would originally have been preceded by a preposition, e.g. in the hale or at the hale.
  2. English: from a Middle English personal name derived from either of two Old English bynames, Hæle ‘hero’ or Hægel, which is probably akin to Germanic Hagano ‘hawthorn’ (see Hain 2).
  3. Irish: reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Céile (see McHale).
  4. Jewish (Ashkenazic): variant spelling of Halle.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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The hale name in History

A unique volume of fascinating facts, statistics and commentary following the hale family name as far back in history as possible.

hale Family Facts

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Distribution of hale Families in the US in 1920
Number of hale families
 349-696
 117-348		 1-116
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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