Cort
Meaning
archaic Low German form of Cord, a contracted form of Conrad, 'brave counsel'
The story
Cort is carried in Behind the Name's community database as an archaic Low German form of Cord, recorded between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and Cord is the German contracted form of Conrad, "brave counsel", from the Old German kuoni and rat. The American ledger gives the four-letter form a long, quiet line of its own: about 40 boys in the 1940s, one or two hundred a decade through midcentury, about 289 in the 1990s, about 446 in the 2000s, about 336 in the 2010s, and about 91 so far this decade. Never common, never absent for long: a name that has spent eighty years just below the noise floor. A medieval German contraction three steps back, and an American line that keeps renewing the lease.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Cort has stayed rare in US records the whole time: no peak decade to name.
The Cort deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Cort truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Cort fits with your family’s names and surname.
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