An English place and surname name, likely meaning high hill or settlement on a rise.
Hendon is a name of Old English topographical origin, derived from the Anglo-Saxon words heah (high) and dun (hill or down), meaning quite literally "the high hill" — a name that began as a place before it became a person. The village of Hendon in what is now the London Borough of Barnet was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and remained a rural settlement on the northern heights above London for centuries before being absorbed into the urban sprawl in the nineteenth century. Place-names making the transition to personal surnames, and then to given names, is one of the oldest patterns in English nomenclature, connecting a bearer to a specific piece of English geography.
The name's most vivid literary appearance is in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (1881), where Miles Hendon is the novel's compassionate adult hero — a disinherited English knight who befriends the young Edward Tudor when he is cast out onto the streets and treats him with loyal, unassuming dignity. Twain's Miles Hendon embodies a particular English type: honorable, pragmatic, and decent without sentimentality. The character gave Hendon an association with steadfast, unpretentious nobility that the bare place-name etymology alone could not have supplied.
As a given name, Hendon belongs to the wave of English surname-names that have been fashionable since the late twentieth century — names like Sutton, Harlow, and Clifton that trade on a combination of geographical solidity and gentle aristocratic suggestion. Hendon is rarer than most of these, giving it a freshness that the more common examples have lost. The two-syllable structure and the firm consonants on both ends give it excellent phonetic clarity.
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