proposes 'Dun' '-tagell' meaning narrow place in his book on place-names. There is a possible cognate in the Channel Islands named Tente d'Agel, but that still leaves the question subject to doubt.

The name first occurs in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, in Latin) as Tintagol, implying pronunciation with a hard [g] sound as in modern English girl. But in Layamon's ''Brut''