Short form of Clinton, from an Old English place name meaning 'settlement on a hill.'
Clint began its life not as a name at all but as a place — specifically a cluster of Old English and Old Norse settlements whose name derived from *clint*, meaning a rocky outcrop or a cliff face. The surname Clinton crystallized from these place names in medieval England, and as was common Victorian practice, the surname migrated into use as a given name during the nineteenth century, eventually contracting to the punchy monosyllable Clint. That compression itself tells a story: the name shed its aristocratic surname-as-forename associations and became something blunt, immediate, and distinctly American.
No single person has shaped the cultural weight of Clint more decisively than Clint Eastwood, whose film career — from the laconic Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns through Dirty Harry and into his directorial work — made the name synonymous with a certain lean, unyielding masculinity. Before Eastwood, the name appeared mainly as a quiet regional choice; after him, it was impossible to hear without a slight squint and the smell of trail dust. Country musician Clint Black reinforced the Western association in the 1990s, cementing the name's identity as resolutely rugged and American.
Usage of Clint peaked in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s in direct correlation with Eastwood's rising stardom, then settled into the steady, unfussy territory occupied by names that never chase trends. It carries no irony, no pretension, and no ambiguity — qualities that have brought it quietly back into consideration among parents who want something short, strong, and phonetically self-assured.