Variant of Roderick, from Germanic elements 'hrod' (fame) and 'ric' (power), meaning famous ruler.
Rodrick is a variant spelling of Roderick, a name with deep Germanic roots: it combines hrod, meaning 'fame' or 'glory,' with ric, meaning 'power' or 'ruler,' yielding roughly 'famous ruler.' The name entered England after the Norman Conquest and was also carried into the Iberian Peninsula by the Visigoths, where Rodrigo — the Spanish form — became one of the most storied names in Iberian history.
Roderick or Rodrigo was the name of the last Visigoth king of Spain, who fell at the Battle of Guadalete in 711 AD when the Moorish armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, an event that echoed through centuries of Iberian legend and literature. In English letters, Roderick Random is the rakish hero of Tobias Smollett's picaresque novel of 1748, one of the great adventure narratives of the eighteenth century. Sir Walter Scott used the name in his 1811 poem Rokeby, and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' gives us the doomed Roderick Usher, making the name somewhat gothic in its Anglo-American literary associations — the brilliant, sensitive man undone by hereditary shadows.
The spelling Rodrick, with its dropped 'e,' has a more grounded, less ornate feel than Roderick, bringing the name into modern territory without losing its historical architecture. The name is perhaps most visible in contemporary popular culture through Rodrick Heffley, the older brother in Jeff Kinney's enormously popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, where the character is played as a drummer in a terrible band — a portrait that, while comedic, has made the name immediately recognizable to an entire generation of young readers.