About the name Cleve
Cleve belongs to the English & American tradition. Its roots are documented, even though its precise meaning is not recorded in the standard references — an honest gap we prefer to a confident guess.
In the United States, Cleve first appears in Social Security records in 1882. It climbed to its best-ever rank of #191 in 1885, and in 2024 0 babies received the name — 4,506 in total since 1880. Those are the official counts, not estimates.