Pyle
Usually a surname from a west-country word for a creek or tidal inlet, and sometimes treated as a form of Pile.
The #2,389 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 20,339 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Most of the older surname writers connect Pyle with English Pile, a west-country term for a creek, inlet, or small tidal waterway. That makes it a topographic surname for someone who lived by such a feature or came from a place named for it. Some 19th-century authorities also linked it with place-name forms in Normandy or treated it as a local English surname variant.
History
The surname appears in medieval records in forms such as atte Pyle and de Pille, which fits a habitational or topographic origin. Later reference works note a particular Northumbrian cluster of the name, but the broader pattern is English rather than uniquely regional. In modern usage, Pyle survives mainly in England and the United States.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
A 1916 surname note explicitly grouped Pyle with Pile and Pill as names tied to a west-country word for a creek.
From the historical record
“PYKE = Pike, q.v. PYLCH(E = Pilch, q.v. PYLE = Pile, q.v. Who fifty rock-rear'd />yfej and castles... — Drayton, Poly-Olbion, xxix. 285. PYMM}=P'"'(«"'q-^- PYNE = Pine, q.v. With many high lorer [laurel] and pyn. —Chaucer, Rom. of the Rose, 1379. PYOTT = Py(e (q.v.) -|- the Fr. dim. suff. -ot. PYPER = Piper, q.v.”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)