Waldo

(male) From a Latinate short form of various old Germanic personal names derived from wald ‘rule’. This gave rise in the Middle Ages to a surname, borne notably by Peter Waldo, a 12th-century merchant of Lyons, who founded a reformist sect known as the Waldensians, which in the 16th century took part in the Reformation movement. In America the name is particularly associated with the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), whose father was a Lutheran clergyman.