From Old English meaning 'bright forest,' famously associated with Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood legend.
Sherwood traces back to Old English: scīr (bright, clear, or shire) combined with wudu (wood, forest). The name was first a place name, most famously attached to Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, the ancient royal hunting ground that became, in the popular imagination, the outlaw kingdom of Robin Hood. Whether a historical Robin Hood existed remains a matter of scholarly debate, but the forest itself is real — a fragment of ancient English wildwood that still stands, home to the Major Oak, a thousand-year-old tree under whose canopy, legend says, the Merry Men once camped.
The Robin Hood tradition gave Sherwood an enduring association with a particular kind of heroism: not courtly or aristocratic, but populist, forest-born, fighting for the common people against corrupt power. That mythological charge infused the name with a romantic energy that made it attractive as a given name from the 19th century onward. Sherwood Anderson, the American author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), is perhaps the most distinguished literary bearer of the name, his short story cycle influencing Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck.
As a given name, Sherwood enjoyed steady American use through the early and mid-20th century before retreating from fashion. It carries the feel of a name that belonged to a grandparent — solid, American, vaguely literary — which in the current era of surname names and old-fashioned revivals positions it for a quiet return. For parents who love the Robin Hood mythos or the American literary tradition, Sherwood offers real depth beneath its straightforward exterior.