Hamlett
A surname most likely from the old personal name Hamlet, rather than from the word for a small village.
The #6,286 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 56,807 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Hamlett is generally treated as a surname formed from the given name Hamlet, an old personal name recorded in medieval English sources. One historical explanation connects Hamlet to an older Scandinavian name, making the surname a descendant of a forename rather than a place-name. A weaker fallback sometimes suggested is the English word hamlet, meaning a small settlement, but the older scholarship quoted here favors the personal-name origin.
History
The surname appears in English records in several spellings, including Hamlet, Hamblet, and Hamnett, with the forms often overlapping in early modern documents. Bardsley notes examples from London and elsewhere and treats Hamblet/Hamlett as variants of Hamlet. The name also became famous through Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark, which likely helped keep the form recognizable, though the surname itself is older than the play.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
One 19th-century source even mentions a provincial meaning of hamlet as a high constable, but that explanation is usually treated as less convincing than the personal-name derivation.
From the historical record
“p. 33. HAMLETT. Hamlet or Ilamleth ap- pears to have been an old Scandinavian personal name, whether the hero of Shaks- peare's tragedy was a real character or only an imaginary one. If this derivation is incorrect, we can hardlj' fall back ujjon hamlet, a small village, for the origin of the surname. Grose says…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom