Darryl

Meaning of Darryl

Darryl, an English given name ultimately rooted in the Norman-French surname d’Airelle (“of Airelle,” a locale in France whose name is cognate with the Old French term for a huckleberry), entered the Anglo-American lexicon through medieval migration and was later standardized in several spellings, of which Darryl and Darrell became the most stable. While its etymology evokes the medieval practice of identifying individuals by place of origin, the name’s modern trajectory in the United States reveals a distinctly twentieth-century profile: after remaining statistically marginal through the 1930s, it climbed steadily, achieving peak popularity in the mid-1960s—when annual births surpassed 4,900 and the rank reached the national Top 100—before embarking on a gradual, decades-long decline that situates it today in the lower eight hundreds. Cultural visibility has been reinforced by figures such as baseball icon Darryl Strawberry and jazz drummer Darryl Jones, lending the name associations of athletic prowess and artistic versatility, yet the current data suggest a transition from mainstream staple to selective, perhaps heritage-minded choice. Phonetically rendered in English as DAIR-uhl (/ˈdɛrəl/), Darryl retains a brisk, two-syllable cadence whose familiarity offsets its waning frequency, thereby offering contemporary parents a historically grounded, recognizable, and under-used alternative within the broader corpus of mid-century masculine names.