Comments (Meaning / History Only)
This shouldn't even be a considerable option for a name. Just a big fat no.
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To the people who are wondering how Richard evolved into Dick as a nickname. It's probably because English originally had a hard "R", like in modern Swedish, Low German, Frisian or Icelandic. And in Old English the "C" sounds like a "K". Middle English still retained the hard R, which is the period this nickname stems from
Virtually all Germanic languages originally had the hard R (in Scandinavia we call it Rulle R), from proto-germanic, the ones that shifted to a different R sound like post-aveolar (contemporary English), or the throaty "R" (we call it Skarre R) like modern Standard Danish and standard high German, absorbed that trait from other languages, particularly French, that is itself based on Franconian German dialects, family that standard Dutch belongs, and when vulgar Latin replaced German dialects as first the language of the Christian church, then of the state, in France, a lot of Germanic traits remained.
Richard used to be pronounced as Rikard, With the hard R, so probably it went like this: Rick > Dick after aveolar shift.
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Virtually all Germanic languages originally had the hard R (in Scandinavia we call it Rulle R), from proto-germanic, the ones that shifted to a different R sound like post-aveolar (contemporary English), or the throaty "R" (we call it Skarre R) like modern Standard Danish and standard high German, absorbed that trait from other languages, particularly French, that is itself based on Franconian German dialects, family that standard Dutch belongs, and when vulgar Latin replaced German dialects as first the language of the Christian church, then of the state, in France, a lot of Germanic traits remained.
Richard used to be pronounced as Rikard, With the hard R, so probably it went like this: Rick > Dick after aveolar shift.
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Dick does not mean penis as someone said, it is slang. Just wanted to clear that up... penis is the right word.
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The slang use of "dick" for "penis" had nothing to do with Richard Nixon. There are written references to it as early as 1891, and since vulgar slang for sexual organs didn't make it into print often back in the 19th century, it's probably really a bit older than that.
It's amazing to me how quickly historical memory about the use of names is lost. Almost every American man named Richard who was born before 1950 would have been called Dick as his main nickname as a matter of course. No one would have thought it was "cruel" to use the name just because it had a slang meaning any more than most people today would think it cruel to name a child John even though that name has the slang meanings of "toilet" and "prostitute's customer". As long as almost everyone heard the name many more times a day than they heard the slang meaning, the name seemed perfectly OK. It's only after Richard became less common as a given name, and people started using sexual slang more openly as part of their everyday conversation, that people in younger generations were able to start thinking of using the name Dick as being "cruel" or "odd".
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It's amazing to me how quickly historical memory about the use of names is lost. Almost every American man named Richard who was born before 1950 would have been called Dick as his main nickname as a matter of course. No one would have thought it was "cruel" to use the name just because it had a slang meaning any more than most people today would think it cruel to name a child John even though that name has the slang meanings of "toilet" and "prostitute's customer". As long as almost everyone heard the name many more times a day than they heard the slang meaning, the name seemed perfectly OK. It's only after Richard became less common as a given name, and people started using sexual slang more openly as part of their everyday conversation, that people in younger generations were able to start thinking of using the name Dick as being "cruel" or "odd".
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