From Old French 'preux' meaning brave or valiant, originally a surname of honor.
Pruitt is an Anglicized form of the Old French surname Proust or Prou, itself derived from the adjective preux, meaning "brave," "valiant," or "gallant" — a word that carried high chivalric currency in medieval France. The term was applied to knights and soldiers who distinguished themselves in battle, and when surnames became hereditary across Normandy and adjacent regions, families bearing this honorific carried it into England with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Over centuries of English phonological shift, Proust and its variants softened and broadened into Pruitt, Prewitt, and Pruit.
In American history, the name is particularly associated with the South and Appalachia, where Scots-Irish and English settlers brought it deep into the interior. The Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis — completed in 1956 and demolished just two decades later — gave the name an unexpected and sobering cultural weight: it became a shorthand in urban planning circles for the failures of mid-century modernist public housing, immortalized in Godfrey Reggio's documentary Koyaanisqatsi.
The complex was named for two men, Wendell O. Pruitt and William L. Igoe, and the name became inseparable from those grand ambitions and their collapse.
As a given first name, Pruitt is genuinely rare, worn mostly by families perpetuating a cherished surname from their own genealogy. It carries the rough-edged charm of names that sound like they belong on a frontier lawman or a Depression-era farmer — two hard syllables with no decorative softening. For parents drawn to surnames-as-first-names with genuine historical marrow, Pruitt offers something gritty and earned.