Peter

Peter comes from the Greek Petros, a name built on petra, the word for stone or rock. The Gospel writers used it to render a nickname given to the apostle Simon, and the plain sense stayed put: a rock is a rock. From Greek it passed into Latin as Petrus, then spread across Europe and took firm hold in England and in the German-speaking lands, where Peter has kept a steady place for centuries.

The meaning stayed close to the surface. To carry the name is to carry the ordinary word for the thing you can pick up and set down.

In a Polish class register a boy named Piotr sits near the front, while the international form Peter turns up on passports and business cards. The best known bearer remains the apostle, the fisherman Simon whom the Gospels rename for the rock on which a church would stand. English readers later met Peters in Scripture and in stories written for children. The short meaning holds through all of them: stone, rock.