The Armenian word giwl / gel (գիւղ) meaning village has different proposed etymologies.

 The Armenian word giwl / gel (գիւղ) meaning village has different proposed etymologies. Jahukyan compare it with Latin villa, Acharyan consider it as having uncertain origin. Hrach Martirosyan propose an interesting etymology, which is further reinforced by an Urartian term.

He derives it from *weli and compares it with Greek parallels meaning assembly of people, crowd, derived from the same root.

Incidently there is also an Urartian term ueli meaning crowd, army.

As for later semantic shift from crowd to village he demonstrates other examples where such a shifts occured.

It's interesting that proto-Turkic word *agil from which is derived the famous word aul has both meanings as village and military camp. More remarkable is that it's close to Armenian giwl and Finnic kyla (village). Pedersen thinks that the proto-Turkic word is a loanword from Armenian giwl. Although those similarities can be chance coincidence, because of huge distance separating them. Another possibility is that it's a loanword from an unknown IE or Uralic? language.