From Dutch 'brandewijn' (burnt wine), adopted as a given name in 20th-century America.
Brandy takes its name from the Dutch "brandewijn," meaning "burnt wine" — a reference to the distillation process that concentrates wine into spirit through heat. English sailors shortened it to "brandy" in the seventeenth century, and the word quickly became one of the most common terms in the English-speaking world for the warming amber spirit. As a given name, Brandy represents a particularly American tradition of adopting beloved nouns and nature words as personal names — a practice that flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century alongside names like Crystal, Candy, and Summer.
The name's cultural moment arrived with Looking Glass's 1972 hit "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)," a wistful tale of a barmaid in a harbor town whose sailor never returns — the sea, he says, will always be his wife. The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and lodged the name firmly in the American imagination as something simultaneously warm, capable, and a little melancholy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Brandy became a genuinely popular given name in the United States, particularly in the South and Midwest, peaking in the mid-1970s.
The R&B singer Brandy Norwood, who burst onto the scene in 1994 with her self-titled debut album and went on to star in "Moesha," gave the name renewed cultural visibility for the 1990s generation and attached it to a legacy of vocal power and warm charisma. Today Brandy sits in that affectionate vintage zone — associated with a specific moment of American popular culture, warmly nostalgic without being stale, carrying the gentle weight of a song half-remembered from childhood.