Jeremy

The biblical bearer is Jeremiah, the sixth-century BCE prophet of Judah whose book is the second of the major prophets in the Hebrew canon.

Active from roughly 627 BCE through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Jeremiah witnessed the Babylonian conquest, was imprisoned by his own people, and is traditionally credited with the Book of Lamentations.

His anguished, politically costly prophecies have given English the word jeremiad for a prolonged lamentation or complaint.

In English literature the shortened Jeremy form appears early. Shakespeare never used it, but Ben Jonson gave the name to the clever servant Jeremy in The Alchemist (1610).

Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Jeremy Fisher (1906) fixed the name in the English nursery imagination. The Jeremy of Salinger’s stories and of the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy” (1991) carry the name into twentieth-century American culture.

U.S. Social Security records list Jeremy in the top 1000 from 1944, but its real ascent came in the 1970s. It entered the top 50 in 1975 and peaked at rank 11 in 1977, a year when more than 33,000 American boys received the name.

It has gently declined since, settling around rank 200 in recent years while remaining solidly mainstream.

Contemporary bearers include British broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, basketball player Jeremy Lin, actor Jeremy Irons, and scientist Jeremy Farrar.

Variants include the French Jérémy, Italian Geremia, and the fuller English form Jeremiah, itself a top-100 American name in the twenty-first century.