Gideon (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

: גדעון) is a masculine given name and surname of Hebrew origin which translates to "feller" or "hewer" (i.e. 'great warrior') in Hebrew. It can also be interpreted as "One who has a stump in place of a hand" or "One who cuts down". The surname comes from the ancestor Gideon and may have been later imported to a surname form. The name gets its origins from the Biblical judge and leader

Gideon Gideon (; ) also named Jerubbaal and Jerubbesheth, was a military leader, judge and prophet whose calling and victory over the Midianites are recounted in of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible. Gideon was the son of Joash, from the Abiez ...

who impressed

Calvinist Calvinism (also called the Reformed Tradition, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed Christianity, or simply Reformed) is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Ca ...

groups like

English Puritans The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. ...

and

French Huguenots The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a Religious denomination, religious group of French people, French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss politica ...

with his martial skill and utility. They then adopted it as a Christian name. The given name was first used in the 16th century when it became common to use 'Old Testament'-derived names. The Huguenots used the surrogate variation Gédéon. The name soon lost popularity in the 20th century as it declined to a low 4 recorded newborn births in Great Britain during the 1930s with this name. Alternate spellings of this name include Gideone, Guideon, and Gidieon. The first name started gaining use in the United States in the 1880s and for about a century it never had a year more than 50 newborns named with this given name until 1980 when there was 83 children born with this name, making it one of the rarer given names of the Late 19th and 20th century. In recent years it has fluctuated in popularity with 1016 total newborns given this name in 2019.The name Gideon is the 308th most common name among social security statistics as of 2018.

References

{{Reflist Modern names of Hebrew origin Jewish given names Given names Surnames Masculine given names Hebrew masculine given names English masculine given names