Richard

History & meaning

Two Germanic pieces, both blunt: ric, ruler or power, and hard, hard or brave. Put together as Ricohard among the Franks, they gave the Normans Richard, and the Normans gave it to England, where within two or three generations of 1066 it had helped push the old English stock of names out of use almost entirely. By the thirteenth century Richard was one of the handful of names most English men were called, and you can measure that in the surnames it threw off: Richards, Richardson, Ritchie, Dickens, Dickson, Dixon, Hicks and Hitchcock all descend from a pet form of it. The rhyming shortenings are the reason there are so many — Rick became Dick and Hick, exactly as Robert became Bob and William became Bill.

Then there are the three kings, none of whom had an easy time. Richard I, the Lionheart, spent perhaps six months of a ten-year reign in England and the rest on crusade or in prison. Richard II came to the throne at ten, was deposed by his cousin in 1399, and died in captivity. Richard III lasted two years and was killed at Bosworth in 1485, the last king of England to die in battle, and then spent five centuries as Shakespeare’s hunchbacked villain. In 2012 a University of Leicester dig under a council car park — the site of the vanished Greyfriars church — found a male skeleton with severe scoliosis and battlefield wounds to the skull. Radiocarbon dating and DNA from living descendants of the king’s sister confirmed it in 2013, and he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015. The bones settled the spine, if not the reputation.

Why parents choose it

The gap between how familiar Richard is and how rarely it is given now is the whole appeal. Nobody will misspell it, nobody will ask twice, and no other boy in the class will have it. It is also a name with an unusually wide wardrobe: Richard for the passport, Rich for work, Rick for anyone who wants him brisker. Parents who dislike all of those should know the child will be handed one anyway.

Middle names for Richard

Two syllables that fade at the end pair well with something short and struck: Richard Cole, Richard James, Richard Quinn, Richard Blaise. The middle names guide has more on ending a name on a hard sound.

Famous Richards

Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics and wrote the best-selling memoirs any physicist has managed. Richard Nixon was the thirty-seventh president and the only one to resign the office. Richard Wagner rebuilt European opera and had a theatre at Bayreuth built to his own specification. Richard Burton was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won none of them. Richard Pryor remade American stand-up comedy in the 1970s, and Sir Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur in 1842.

Consider instead

Robert came over on the same Norman boat, works the same way with nicknames, and is holding on rather better at #92 in the U.S. Ricardo and Riccardo are the Spanish and Italian forms, both far livelier than the English original. Edward is the native English alternative of the same vintage and register, for anyone who would rather not have the Normans.