Since 1963, the wildest hero in picture books has been a boy named Max — it's time your Max took the crown

Three letters that mean 'the greatest'

Max is a Latin superlative hiding in plain sight. It comes from maximus — 'the greatest', the top step of magnus, 'great' — so the shortest name on the shelf carries the biggest claim in the dictionary. Roman commanders bore Maximus as a title of honour, Habsburg emperors carried Maximilian across Europe, and at some point English speakers decided the best part was the first syllable. For most of the twentieth century Max lived as the short form of Maximilian and Maxwell; today it increasingly stands alone on the birth certificate, and it has held a steady place among the most popular boys' names across the English-speaking world for a good three decades. It is also one of the great travellers among names: Max reads exactly the same in English, German, French, Dutch and Swedish, and in Germany it spent years at the very top of the charts. Sendak was not even the first to spot its storybook pull: German children had been giggling at Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz since 1865, a full century before the wild things, which makes Max one of the very few names with two classics of children's literature to its credit. In a family that crosses borders, the name on the cover never needs translating. The practical gifts are just as real: one clean syllable carries across any playground, it cannot be shortened because it already is the short form, and there is no spelling of it a school register can get wrong.

Maxie, Maximilian and the other shapes of the name

• Max — The everyday name — and, more and more often, the whole name. Many parents skip the long forms entirely and put Max on the birth certificate, which tells you how complete those three letters feel.
• Maxie — The soft version for the toddler years, for bedtime and grazed knees. Most boys shrug it off around school age; most grandmothers never do.
• Maximilian — The grand imperial long form, kept in reserve for formal documents — and for moments when a full four syllables of trouble need naming from the bottom of the stairs.
• Maxwell — The Scottish route to the same boy, borrowed from a surname. The middle-ground long form for families who find Maximilian a little too much crown.
• Maximus — The original Latin, usually deployed at his own request during knight and gladiator phases — and a handy way to explain what his everyday name means: Max is simply 'the greatest', in the fewest possible letters.