Guy
Where Guy comes from
From Old French Gui, from a Frankish form of Proto-West Germanic *Widō (compare Old Dutch Wido), a short form of names beginning with the element *widu (“wood”), from Proto-Germanic *widuz; see for example modern German Witold and Old Saxon Widukind. Cognate with Italian Guido and thus a doublet of Guido. More at wood.
- Germanic
- Hebrew
- 1 syllable
- Vowel-ended
Along the way
- 1570Guy Fawkes bornEnglish member of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605
- 1850Guy de Maupassant bornFrench writer
- 1880First SSA yearAlready #68 among boys — 239 babies in the first year on record.
- 1892Peak, #65315 babies named Guy — more than any year before or since.
- 2005The fadeThe first year with half the peak's births — down to #1,081.
In the dictionary
- A male given name from the Germanic languages.
- A male given name from Hebrew.
Namesakes
- Guy de Maupassant · French writer, 1850–1893
- Guy Fawkes · English member of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, 1570–1606
- Guy Verhofstadt · Prime Minister of Belgium from 1999 to 2008, born 1953
- Guy Ritchie · English filmmaker, born 1968
- Guy Pearce · Australian actor, born 1967
Sources: the origin note and dictionary entry are quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0); the namesakes come from Wikidata (CC0); the milestones are worked out from the SSA record.