Explore the Family Name Hall

The meaning of Hall

1. English, Scottish, Irish, German, Norwegian, and Danish: from Middle English hall (Old English heall), Middle High German halle, Old Norse hǫll all meaning ‘hall’ (a spacious residence), hence a topographic name for someone who lived in or near a hall or an occupational name for a servant employed at a hall. In some cases it may be a habitational name from any of the places called with this word, which in some parts of Germany and Austria in the Middle Ages also denoted a salt mine. Hall is one of the commonest and most widely distributed of English surnames, bearing witness to the importance of the hall as a feature of the medieval village. The English surname has been established in Ireland since the 14th century, and, according to MacLysaght, has become numerous in Ulster since the 17th century. 2. Swedish: ornamental or topographic name from hall ‘hall’ (a spacious residence), or a habitational name from a placename containing the element hall ‘rock’ (from Old Norse hallr). 3. Chinese: variant Romanization of the surnames 何 and 賀, see He 1 and 2. History: John Hall, an Englishman born in Kent in 1584 who emigrated to New England in 1632, founded a notable American family, whose members have included Lyman Hall (1724–90), politician and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; Asaph Hall (1829–1907), astronomer, who discovered the two satellites of Mars; and Stanley Hall (1844–1924), pioneer in psychophysics. — Another John Hall emigrated to North America c.1652, settling in MA. His descendants include Charles M. Hall (1863–1914), who invented a process for the mass production of aluminum. — David Hall, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, around 1714, came to Philadelphia, PA, in 1743 and was a partner of Benjamin Franklin in the printing business.

Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd edition, © Oxford University Press, 2022.

What do people with the surname Hall have in common?

Spoiler alert: it's complicated. People with the same last name are usually no more genetically similar than a randomly sampled group of people from the same population. That said, people with the same surname are more likely to have similar ancestries than randomly sampled individuals. The reason is the tendency of people with similar cultural or geographical backgrounds to preferentially mate with one another. That's why people who share a surname may be more likely to share traits and tendencies in common than people within the general population. Check out the percentages below to see the prevalences of tastes, habits, and traits of people with your surname compared with prevalences among 23andMe users.