Kimble
A surname usually taken from places called Kimble in Buckinghamshire, England.
The #2,003 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 17,114 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Kimble is generally treated as a locational surname, meaning someone who came from Great Kimble or Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire. The name of the place is old and probably goes back to an early English personal name, though the exact prehistory is not fully certain from the 19th-century sources. Some older writers also linked it with other similar-looking forms, but the Buckinghamshire place-name explanation is the standard one.
History
19th-century surname dictionaries regularly list Kimble alongside other surnames formed from the Buckinghamshire parish names Great and Little Kimble. The form appears in English records and later became familiar in America as a family name. Because the surname is tied to a place-name, it likely spread as people moved away from Buckinghamshire and were identified by their origin.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Great Kimble and Little Kimble are still the classic place references behind the surname, and older reference books explicitly caution readers not to confuse Kimble with the similar surname Kemble.
From the historical record
“South Kimber. KIMBLE. See Kemble. KIME. SeeKyme. KIIMPTON. Parishes in Hertfordshire and Hampshire. |®° KIN. In old Teutonic, a child ; hence the diminutives found in so many of our family names, as Wilkin, " Little William," Tompkin, "little Thomas,"”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom