Terrence

Traced to the Roman family name Terentius, whose earliest famous bearer was the playwright Terence. English speakers adopted it centuries later, partly through Ireland, where it was drafted to anglicize the Gaelic name Toirdhealbhach. The double-r spelling became the American postwar standard.

The name reads like a man who knows how to chair a committee meeting and does not skip the reading material beforehand. Today it belongs squarely to middle adulthood, with an average bearer hovering near age forty-nine. It suggests someone who still owns a landline purely out of habit. The spelling with two r's spent the twentieth century competing politely against the single-r version.