From the Dutch ‘kill’, creek or channel: many small streams cross the area.
‘Kill’ is archaic Dutch, and the name can be read as ‘a great number of streams’. It goes back informally at least to 1664, when the French settler Jacques Guyon called the area ‘La Grand Kills’, and has been in use since 1865. Earlier the area was known as Giffords, after Daniel Gifford, a local commissioner and surveyor; the station was first called Gifford’s.