[6][7] There has been human activity and settlement in the area of the village since the Neolithic era (4000–2000 BC), with subsistence agriculture and fishing the most common occupations for much of its early history.

A largely destroyed, collapsed dolmen can be found from this period in the parish, located at Ty Mawr north of the present-day church; early Ordnance Survey maps show a long cairn on the site.

[10] Surveys of the later medieval period show that the tenants of the township of Pwllgwyngyll, as it was then known, held a total of 9 bovates of land from the Bishop of Bangor under the feudal system.

The village is still signposted Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and the railway station is officially named Llanfairpwll, a form used by local residents.

[18][19] This form of the name adds a reference to the whirlpool in the Menai Strait known as the Swellies and to the small chapel of St. Tysilio, located on a nearby island.

[21] Literally translated, the long form of the name means: "[The] church of [St.] Mary (Llanfair) [of the] pool (pwll)[22][a] of the white hazels (gwyn gyll) near to [lit.

Other places of interest in the area include Anglesey Sea Zoo, Bryn Celli Ddu Burial Chamber, St. Tysilio's Church, and Plas Cadnant Hidden Gardens.

[28] In his 1957 appearance on You Bet Your Life, the Welsh academic John Hughes answered host Groucho Marx's question about the location of his birthplace by mentioning the town.

The name was submitted to Guinness World Records as the longest word to appear in a published cryptic crossword, having been used by compiler Roger Squires in 1979.

The clue was "Giggling troll follows Clancy, Larry, Billy and Peggy who howl, wrongly disturbing a place in Wales (58)", where all but the last five words formed an anagram.

[33] In September 2015, Channel 4 News weatherman Liam Dutton went viral around the world after accurately pronouncing the name of the town in one of his weather reports.

[34] In 2024 Volkswagen used the difficult name of the village in a TV commercial as an example to show the functions of the inbuilt navigation system's AI and speech recognition.