Renard
Germanic at root, from words for "brave counsel," though the name also carries the sense of a fox: quick wits, cunning. In Poland barely a hundred men carry it, so most Poles have never met one.
Renard Pronunciation
Renard is pronounced RE-nahrt (/ˈrɛnart/).
What Renard means
Where Renard comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Renard begins in Germanic sound, in the compound Reginhard. Its first part, ragin, meant counsel or advice. Its second, hard, meant brave, strong, hardy. Put together they give the sense the name still carries: brave counsel. Frankish settlers brought it into what became France, where it softened into Renard.
Then the fox arrived. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a cycle of beast tales, the Roman de Renart, made a trickster fox its hero and gave him the name Renart. The stories grew so popular that the fox's name replaced the old French word for the animal, goupil. That is why renard is simply the French word for fox today, and why the name reads in Polish as lis, with its overtones of spryt and przebiegłość.
A name meaning brave counsel became a byword for cunning. The two meanings sit side by side. A boy named Renard on a Polish class register holds both the old Germanic advice and the sly French fox.
How many people are named Renard
1 in 205252 men in Poland is named Renard. 104 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3357 among male names.
Renard as a middle name
Renard is a first name for 104 men in Poland and a middle name for another 42, a 71/29 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 1223rd, between Paschalis (42) and Sébastien (42).
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#1221 Nabil42
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#1222 Paschalis42
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#1223 Renard42
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#1224 Sébastien42
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#1225 Tarek42