From French 'rêver' meaning 'to dream,' or from Latin 'revereri' meaning 'to stand in awe of.'
Revere arrives in English from the Latin *revereri*, "to stand in awe of, to respect deeply," via the Old French *reverer*. As a verb and attitude, to revere something is to hold it in the highest regard — a word the English language reserves for ancestors, sacred objects, and those who have earned a particular kind of love mixed with awe. As a given name, it is almost entirely an American invention, and its dominant cultural association is with a single man: Paul Revere (1735–1818), the Boston silversmith and patriot whose midnight ride warning colonial militias of British troop movements in April 1775 became one of the Revolution's founding myths.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1861 poem "Paul Revere's Ride" — "Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere" — cemented the name in American cultural memory with a vividness that few poems have achieved for any historical figure. Longfellow was not entirely accurate (Revere was captured before completing his ride; William Dawes and Samuel Prescott continued the mission), but accuracy was beside the point. The poem made Revere synonymous with courage, civic duty, and the thundering energy of a man on horseback against the night.
As a given name, Revere is extraordinarily uncommon, which gives it a striking quality when encountered. It works as a first name precisely because it sounds like a virtue as well as a surname — in the same register as names like Noble, Justice, or Valor. For American parents with a strong sense of history and an appetite for the unusual, Revere is a name that announces both patriotism and individuality in a single word.