Paul

Derived from the Roman family cognomen Paullus. The name entered English usage after the Norman Conquest and reached broad British circulation by the sixteenth century. In the United States, it maintained steady representation from 1880 onward before peaking in the nineteen-fifties.

The name reads as someone who remembers buying single brass screws from divided wooden bins. With an average bearer age of fifty-seven, a Paul tends to be pictured standing beside a station wagon. A 1957 peak of around twenty-seven thousand births anchors forty percent of living holders to the Boomer generation. It reads today as an efficient monosyllable that keeps the original appliance manual in a kitchen drawer.