God comes from the English word for the supreme deity, ultimately tied to ancient Germanic religious vocabulary.
God is among the most audacious names a parent can bestow, and its linguistic history is appropriately ancient. The English word derives from Proto-Germanic *gudą, which philologists connect to a Proto-Indo-European root likely meaning 'to invoke' or 'the invoked one' — notably, the original Germanic concept was grammatically neuter, a force summoned rather than a patriarchal ruler, a meaning shaped later by Christian theology's encounter with the word. Related forms appear in Gothic (guþ), Old Norse (goð), and Old High German (got), all threading back to the same act of ritual calling.
Actual human bearers of the name God are extraordinarily rare and have encountered legal resistance in several countries — New Zealand, Germany, and Iceland have at various points listed it among prohibited names. In the United States, where naming laws are more permissive, a handful of individuals are recorded with God as a legal given name, typically as an expression of deep religious devotion, cultural defiance, or both simultaneously. The name appears in certain African and African diaspora communities as a theological statement — a declaration that the child is a manifestation of the divine, a tradition that also underlies names like Godwin, Godfrey, and the West African Chukwuemeka.
Carrying such a name through a life is an ongoing negotiation with other people's expectations, discomfort, and occasional reverence. It collapses the distance between the sacred and the personal in a way that almost no other word in the English language can. For all the controversy it invites, God as a name is a radical act of naming-as-theology — the most literal possible assertion that a child arrives in this world as something more than ordinary.