From Old English bucc meaning "male deer," used as a spirited masculine name.
Buck is a name with the directness and weight of the natural world behind it — an Old English and Germanic word for a male deer or goat, related to Dutch *bok* and German *Bock*, all ultimately descended from Proto-Germanic *bukkaz*. As a given name and nickname it has deep roots in American vernacular culture, where it carried connotations of vigorous masculinity, frontier self-reliance, and an easy, unpretentious toughness that felt distinctly of the land.
Among its most celebrated bearers is Buck Henry, the screenwriter and actor; Buck Clayton, the jazz trumpeter who shaped the Count Basie orchestra's sound; and most famously Buck Rogers, the science fiction hero whose serialized adventures beginning in 1928 launched an entire genre of American popular imagination. In literature, the name carries perhaps its most powerful resonance in Jack London's *The Call of the Wild* (1903), whose protagonist is a dog named Buck — an animal of enormous strength and latent wildness, pulled between civilization and the primordial — giving the name an almost mythic quality in American letters. Buck was used freely as a given name and nickname through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated with the American West, with cowboys and ranchers and outdoorsmen.
It receded from formal birth-certificate use in the latter half of the twentieth century but retained its warmth as an affectionate nickname. Today it is experiencing a tentative revival among parents drawn to monosyllabic Old West-inflected names — alongside Hank, Clyde, and Colt — names that feel grounded, unadorned, and genuinely American in their plainspoken confidence.