Penkridge is a large village and civil parish in South Staffordshire District in Staffordshire, England. It is to the south of Stafford, north of Wolverhampton, west of Cannock and east of Telford.

The wealthiest establishment in Penkridge in the Middle Ages, its collegiate church building survived the abolition of the chantries and is the tallest structure in the village centre. The parish is crossed towards its eastern border by the M6 motorway and a separate junction north of the M6 toll between the West Midlands and Stoke-on-Trent. Penkridge has a railway station on the West Coast Main Line railway next to the Grade I listed medieval church. Penkridge Viaduct and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal are to either side of Market Street and the Old Market Square and are among its landmarks.

The popular etymology of the village's name derives it from the River Penk, which flows through it. It was assumed that since the village could be said to stand on a ridge by the Penk, it must derive its name from the river. However, this is to reverse the true derivation. The name of the village, or something like it, is attested many centuries before that of the river. The name "Penk" is actually a back-formation from the name of the village.

The occupying Romans gave their fort in the area the Latin form Pennocrucium. Cameron argues that this, like similar Latinized Celtic names, was passed by the native British directly, orally in its Celtic form, to the later Anglo-Saxon occupiers—not through the medium of Latin. Thus the name Pennocrucium attests the origins of the name Penkridge, but is not its direct origin. In the indigenous Celtic, the name of the village was almost certainly penn-crug, meaning "the head (or end) of the ridge", or "chief hill or mound", and pronounced roughly penkrik. In very early times of Anglian settlement the inhabitants of the district were known as the Pencersæte. In 958, a charter uses the form Pencric for the settlement. This is obviously close to the modern "Penkridge", and both are closer in pronunciation to the Celtic root than to the Latinized form.

The name might reflect the village's location at the terminus of the long ridge of land running along the east side of the river. However, this ridge is not actually very prominent and few visitors would perceive Penkridge as a hill town. Modern toponymists have become convinced that the hill in question was more likely a tumulus—prominent in pre-Roman and Roman times, and perhaps much later. Brewer comments that "none is evident in the locality". However, Margaret Gelling, predisposed to find direct evidence for toponyms in the local landscape, has proposed a precise location for the mound, now destroyed by ploughing, that gave both the village and, ultimately, the river their names.