From the animal name coyote, used as a bold modern nature name through Spanish and Native borrowing.
Coyote arrives as a given name from one of the richest symbolic traditions in North America. The word comes from the Nahuatl "coyōtl," adopted into Spanish as coyote and then into English. In the cosmologies of dozens of Indigenous nations across the Great Plains, Southwest, Pacific Coast, and Great Basin, Coyote is not merely an animal but a Trickster deity — a figure of immense cultural complexity who simultaneously creates and destroys, teaches and deceives, represents chaos and renewal.
He steals fire and gives it to humanity; he breaks taboos to reveal why they exist; he makes the world through his blunders as often as his wisdom. The Trickster is among the oldest archetypal figures in human mythology, and Coyote is North America's most fully realized expression of it. He appears in the oral literatures of the Navajo, Nez Perce, Crow, Shoshone, and many other nations, always uncontainable, always consequential.
That mythic stature entered broader American counterculture in the twentieth century — Coyote appears in the poetry of Gary Snyder and the fiction of Tom King; Peter Coyote, the actor and writer, chose the name as a young man during the 1960s commune movement. As a given name, Coyote is bold and unmistakably intentional — a declaration of wildness, adaptability, and mythic depth. It is rare, carrying both Indigenous cultural heritage and a counterculture American spirit.