From Spanish or Italian, possibly meaning "reborn"; also a place name from Nevada.
Reno as a given name travels two distinct roads. The first is geographic: the city in Nevada took its name in 1868 from General Jesse Lee Reno, a Union officer killed at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. Reno himself bore a French Huguenot surname, likely derived from Renaud or Renault — forms of the Germanic Raginwald, meaning 'counsel-power.'
When a place becomes iconic enough, its name loosens from its origin and becomes available again as a forename, detached and ready for reinvention. The second road is purely Romance-language: Reno exists as a standalone Italian and Spanish given name in its own right, sometimes appearing as a diminutive of Renoaldo or Renato (reborn), the latter descending from Latin renatus, with its connotations of spiritual renewal. This religious resonance gave Renato wide circulation in Catholic southern Europe, and Reno followed as its casual, vivid twin.
In American culture, Reno conjures a complex atmosphere — part desert freedom, part neon transience. Midcentury it was shorthand for quick divorces and low-stakes gambling, which gave it an outlaw glamour that suits the contemporary appetite for names with a lived-in swagger. Musicians, writers, and filmmakers have leaned into this. Today Reno sits in the company of place-names-turned-forenames like Rio, Odessa, and Memphis: names that carry a landscape inside them, promising a child something wider than their town of birth.