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Eric

proper nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɛɹɪk//

A male given name from the Germanic languages.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A male given name from the Germanic languages.

    "What's your name?" "Eric - I mean Williams." "Then why don't you say what you mean?"

    Mark it. Professor Roberts does not like the name Eric. This happens to be one of his given names, and it is a very honorable one. Eric was the first Viking explorer of the North American continent, and this ERIC we hope will be an explorer in the fields of complex therapy.

    In 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives in the school library.

    The episode follows two different stories: in one, the show’s resident bigot, Eric Cartman, is outraged to learn that fellow fourth grader Clyde has risen to prominence as a white nationalist podcaster who makes offensive claims about women, Jewish people, Black people and other minority groups to goad them into debating him in exploitative viral videos (“WOKE STUDENT TOTALLY PWNED”).

Etymology

From Middle English Eric, from Old English Eoric, from Old Norse Eirríkr, Eiríkr (from ei (“always, eternal”, see aye) + ríkr (“ruler”)), or from Proto-Germanic *Aizarīkijaz (from *aizō (“honor”) + *rīkijaz (“ruler”)). Less likely from einn (“sole, alone”) + ríkr (“ruler”), from Proto-Germanic *rīks (“king”, cognate to Latin rēx and Gaulish *rīx). The name was in use in Anglo-Saxon Britain, reinforced by Scandinavian settlers before the Norman Conquest. Compare Danish Erik, German Erich. Possible doublet of Euric.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).