From the English season and water-source word, evoking new growth and renewal.
Spring is among the most ancient and universally resonant of the nature names, derived from the Old English "springan," meaning to leap, burst forth, or rise — the same root that gives us the verb "to spring." As a season name, Spring personifies renewal, fertility, and the return of light after winter, associations so fundamental to human experience that virtually every culture has mythologized them. In English, the season was known simply as "lencten" (Lent) in the early medieval period; "spring" as a seasonal designation emerged around the 14th century, from the phrase "spring of the year" — the time when plants spring from the earth.
As a personal name, Spring has been used occasionally throughout English-speaking history, primarily as an evocative nature choice for children born in the season itself. It sits in distinguished company alongside Summer, Autumn, and Winter as seasonal given names, but Spring carries arguably the most optimistic charge of the four — it is the season of beginnings, of color returning, of possibility. The name appears in literature and poetry as an embodiment of hope; Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson all personified Spring as a vital, generative force.
In modern naming, Spring benefits from the sustained enthusiasm for nature names that has marked the 21st century. It reads as simultaneously fresh and timeless, neither burdened by fashion cycles nor cut off from tradition. For a child born in March, April, or May, it is a name that will always be true to its origins; for any child, it offers the promise encoded in its very etymology — something leaping forward into light.