Why does the name 'John' have an 'h' in it?

I have always wondered this since I was little, and nobody seems to have asked or answered this before anywhere on the internet. What is the origin of the 'h', and why is it still with us?

Solution 1:

That's a relic from previous versions of the name. From Etymonline:

John masc. proper name, mid-12c., from M.L. Johannes, from L.L. Joannes, from Gk. Ioannes, from Heb. Yohanan (in full y'hohanan) lit. "Jehovah has favored," from hanan "he was gracious."

Solution 2:

It seems to be a remnant of the h in the Latin spelling Johannes, possibly via an abbreviation.

In some early documents, e.g. the 1292 Subsidy Rolls of London, John is most often abbreviated as Joh', but occasionally you meet a non-abbreviated spelling such as Jon. And in the Rutland Lay Subsidy of 1296, the name occurs as John unless it's a patronymic (filius Johannis). Ditto for the 1332 Lay Subsidy Rolls for Lincolnshire, but just a little bit later, the 1381 Suffolk Poll Tax mostly writes it out as Johannes, with a few odd cases (Johanne, Johannis), a couple where the -us ending is lost (Johann), and one "Joh...". Skipping ahead a few centuries, the Registers of the Church of St. Mary's, Dymock, 1538-1600 have quite a few variant spellings: John (788), Jhon (25), Johne (3), Jon (4), Johan (1), Jonh (1).

From this, I would tentatively conclude that (1.) the vernacular pronunciation of the name became a single-syllable "Jon" fairly early on, and (2.) the John spelling might have originally been a Latin-language abbreviation, but it came to be used as the standard vernacular spelling because it matched the vernacular pronunciation.