Jack

Jack has been the English everyman for so long that Middle English writers used it as a generic stand-in for any young fellow — Jack the lad, Jack of all trades, Jack in the beanstalk, Jack at every card table, every man Jack of them. It began as a Norman French diminutive of John (itself from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning God is gracious), filtered through Jankin and Jackin in medieval English, and somewhere along the way became its own complete name.

Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild under it; Jack Kerouac drove across America under it; Jack Nicholson grinned from a hotel hallway in The Shining under it; Jack Lemmon, Jack Black, Jack White, and Jack Whitehall have all carried it across film, music, and comedy without it ever feeling shared. Jack sat at the top of the British charts for over a decade in the 1990s and 2000s, and remains a fixture of the American top twenty, where it has hovered since the early 2000s.

Famous Jacks also include Jack Kennedy (the future president, before Jack became JFK), Jack Welch, Jack Dempsey, and the small army of fictional Jacks who occupy almost every genre — Jack Ryan, Jack Sparrow, Jack Bauer, Jack Reacher. One syllable, hard-edged, friendly as a pub door — and unusually flexible across ages and registers, equally at home on a kindergartner and a sixty-year-old. Folk without being twee, traditional without being stiff. A name that is never pretending to be anything it isn't.