From the English word valiant, meaning brave and courageous.
Valiant is an English virtue name drawn directly from the Old French vaillant, itself from the Latin valere — "to be strong, to be worth, to have power." The same root gives us valor, valid, and avail, all sharing that core sense of potent worth. As an adjective, valiant has described heroic courage in the face of danger since the fourteenth century, appearing throughout the literature of chivalry as the highest praise a knight could receive.
The name carries strong literary associations. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) features a character named Valiant-for-Truth, one of the pilgrims who reaches the Celestial City after fighting off his enemies with nothing but a sword and a shield — a figure who gave the name its most celebrated embodiment in English devotional literature. The passage describing his death — "he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side" — remains one of the most quoted in English prose.
Prince Valiant, the comic strip hero created by Hal Foster in 1937, brought the name into the twentieth century as a symbol of noble adventure, set in the Arthurian world and running continuously for nearly a century. As a given name, Valiant is exceedingly rare, sitting at the edge of the English naming tradition where virtue names shade into the boldly aspirational. It belongs to the same family as Honor, True, and Brave — names parents choose when they want to set not merely a label but a standard. A child named Valiant carries in her name both an ancient Latin root and a very specific English ideal: not reckless daring, but courage measured and deliberate.