Zurich is taken from the Swiss place name, making it a modern place-based given name.
Zurich as a given name is a rare and boldly geographic choice, borrowing directly from one of Europe's most storied cities. The city's name has ancient roots: the Romans called it Turicum, a name that likely derives from a Celtic toponym, possibly connected to the Gaulish word for "settlement" or from the pre-Celtic substrate name for the river Limmat. By the medieval period the name had evolved through Zūrich into the modern German Zürich, the city that would become synonymous with Swiss banking, Reformation theology (Huldrych Zwingli launched the Protestant Reformation there in 1519), and twentieth-century modernist art (the Dada movement was born at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916).
The practice of using place names as given names has deep roots in many cultures — think of Florence, Dallas, Brooklyn, or India — and typically signals either a family connection to the place or a desire for the name's cultural associations to attach themselves to the child. Zurich carries associations of precision, cosmopolitanism, order, and a certain cool Alpine clarity. The city sits at the intersection of German and Romance Europe, speaks multiple languages, and has been a refuge for artists, exiles, and thinkers from James Joyce (who lived and died there) to Lenin (who plotted revolution in its cafes).
As a given name, Zurich is essentially undocumented in historical records, making any child named Zurich a genuine pioneer. The phonetics are appealing: the z opener is crisp and distinctive, the -oo- vowel is open and round, and the final -ik sound closes cleanly. It reads as masculine but is technically gender-neutral, a contemporary advantage. To name a child Zurich is to give them the weight of a European capital and the lightness of a name so rare it is entirely their own.