From the town Kendal in Cumbria, meaning 'valley of the River Kent'. A unisex place name.
Kendal originates as an English place name, derived from the Old Norse *Kenet-dale* — "valley of the River Kent" — referring to the market town of Kendal in Cumbria, in the Lake District of northwest England. Like many place-turned-personal names, it made the transition gradually, first as a surname and then as a given name. The town of Kendal has its own storied history: it was a center of the medieval wool trade, famous for a distinctive green cloth called "Kendal green" (mentioned by Shakespeare's Falstaff in *Henry IV, Part 1*).
More recently it is known for Kendal Mint Cake, the sugary energy bar that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay carried to the summit of Everest in 1953. As a given name, Kendal — and its variant Kendall — has been used for both boys and girls, though it has tilted increasingly feminine in recent decades, partly through association with Kendall Jenner, the American model and media personality. The single-l spelling Kendal retains a slightly more archaic, place-name quality.
It occupies a comfortable space in the landscape of contemporary names — familiar but not common, with the ease of clear pronunciation and the subtle character of its English topographic roots. For parents drawn to place names with genuine historical weight, Kendal offers something more quietly specific than the broader category.