From the English word for the fruit, ultimately from Old French 'cherise,' also a pet form of Charity.
Cherry as a given name draws from multiple overlapping sources. As a plant name it joins the Victorian fashion for botanical girls' names — Rose, Lily, Violet, Hazel — with the cherry tree carrying particular symbolism: in Japan the sakura represents the beauty and brevity of life; in European tradition the cherry signals summer abundance and a certain coquettish sweetness. As a given name it also functioned as a diminutive of Charity, one of the three theological virtues, which enjoyed considerable fashion in Puritan and post-Puritan naming culture.
Cherry has a lively literary history. Dickens gave the name to Cherry Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, a vain and comic figure. More enduringly, the Cherry Ames series — a run of nurse adventure novels published from 1943 through the 1960s — made Cherry a name associated with competent, independent young women navigating professional life, and those books shaped the reading childhoods of millions of mid-century American girls.
In musical culture, "Cherry" has appeared in song titles across genres from ragtime to rock, often carrying connotations of sweetness or first love. The name peaked in America in the mid-twentieth century, declined with the broader retreat from casual nickname-names, and now sits in an interesting position: old enough to feel vintage, unusual enough to feel fresh, and short enough to wear easily. It belongs to a cluster of fruit-and-flower names — alongside Plum, Clover, and Wren — that have found renewed interest among parents drawn to names that feel both natural and slightly playful.