Hamlet traces a characteristically English round trip: a Germanic root that traveled through French before returning home. The word entered English in the fourteenth century from Old French hamelet, a diminutive of hamel (small village). The Old French hamel came from Frankish *haim (home, village), from Proto-Germanic *haimaz (home). This is the same root that produced English home, German Heim and Heimat (homeland), Swedish hem, and the -ham ending found in hundreds of English place names (Birmingham, Nottingham, Buckingham).
The double diminutive is worth noting. Old French hamel was already a small village; hamelet added a further diminutive suffix, creating something like 'a little small village.' English hamlet thus designates the smallest category of settlement in the traditional hierarchy: a hamlet is smaller than a village, which is smaller than a town, which is smaller than a city. In English planning terminology, a hamlet is specifically a settlement without a church — the church being the institution
The Proto-Germanic *haimaz behind hamlet is one of the most emotionally charged roots in the Germanic languages. German Heimat — homeland, the place where one belongs — carries profound cultural and political significance. The English home, with its associations of warmth, security, and identity, draws from the same well. That hamlet, the most modest of settlements, shares
Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet shares the word's spelling but not its etymology. The character's name comes from the Old Norse legend of Amleth (Amlóði), recorded by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the twelfth century. The name Amleth may derive from Old Norse aml- meaning 'dim-witted' or 'mad' — a reference to the protagonist's feigned insanity, which he uses as a survival strategy against his murderous uncle. Shakespeare borrowed the name through
The place-name element -ham, from the same Germanic root, is one of the most common components in English toponymy. It appears in Southampton, Durham, Chatham, and hundreds of other place names, each recording an original Anglo-Saxon homestead or settlement. These names are living fossils of the English settlement pattern — each -ham on the map marks a spot where, over a thousand years ago, a Germanic-speaking family established a home.