Adelaide
- Pronunciation
- [A-de-laide]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Sweet Or Noble
- Origin
- German
About the Name Adelaide
Adelaide descends from the Old Germanic Adalheidis, composed of adal (noble) and heid (kind, sort) — yielding "of noble kind" or "noble birth" (see separate entries on Alice and Adeline, all sharing the same Germanic root). The longer formal Adelaide is the most elaborate of the family.
The name's medieval anchor is Saint Adelaide of Italy (931–999), the Holy Roman Empress who, alongside her husband Emperor Otto I, helped re-establish the medieval Holy Roman Empire and was canonized in 1097 for her religious devotion and political leadership. Other notable historical bearers include 18th-century French queen consort Adelaide of Savoy, and the American capital city of Adelaide, South Australia — named in 1837 after Queen Adelaide, the consort of King William IV of Britain.
Adelaide held a US top-100 girls' rank from 1880 through 1916 — over three decades of late-Victorian and Edwardian-era popularity. After a long mid-20th-century quiet period, the name has been climbing back through the 2010s and 2020s as part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Eleanor and Charlotte. Adelaide climbed from outside the US top 500 in 2000 to the US top 200 girls' rank by 2018 and the top 100 by 2022. The name's appeal is its layered Germanic-medieval-royal pedigree combined with four flowing syllables that nickname easily. The name reads as both classical-elegant and distinctly contemporary. Common nicknames span an unusually wide range: Addie, Ada, Adi, Heidi (back-end shortening), Della, Laidy, and the rare Aida. International forms include Adelaide (essentially identical across European languages), Adelheid (German), Adélaïde (French, with accents), and the broader Alice/Adeline/Allison family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Adelaide
US Popularity History (2005–2025)
Annual US births named Adelaide by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2016 with 1,240 girls named Adelaide (girl rank #255 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #289 for girls (1,062 US births). That's 34 places below its 2016 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Adelaide Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Adelaide the strongest states are Utah, Rhode Island, Alaska.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah | #96 | 403 |
| 2 | Rhode Island | #127 | 28 |
| 3 | Alaska | #132 | 34 |
| 4 | New Hampshire | #136 | 61 |
| 5 | Idaho | #139 | 127 |
| 6 | Maine | #147 | 67 |
| 7 | Colorado | #153 | 324 |
| 8 | District of Columbia | #161 | 36 |
| 9 | North Dakota | #175 | 24 |
| 10 | Washington | #180 | 354 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | #451 | 740 |
| 2 | Mississippi | #446 | 48 |
| 3 | Florida | #445 | 371 |
| 4 | Texas | #414 | 729 |
| 5 | Nevada | #392 | 51 |
| 6 | New York | #374 | 441 |
| 7 | Alabama | #367 | 122 |
| 8 | New Jersey | #365 | 211 |
| 9 | Georgia | #345 | 293 |
| 10 | Oklahoma | #343 | 116 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Adelaide in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ada | Ibo Of Nigeria Name For Firstborn Females. | Female | African |
| Addie | Variant Of Adela. | Female | French |
| Addy | Ardent | Male | English |
| Adela | Good Humor | Female | French |
| Adelina | Of The Nobility. Noble. Variant Of Adela. | Female | French |
| Adeline | Sweet: Of The Nobility. Noble. | Female | German |
| Adi | Myth Name (A Form Of Vasishtha) | Male | Indian |
| Alice | Sweet | Female | German |
| Del | Surname Prefix Meaning Of The. Also Used As An Independent Name And An Abbreviation Of Names Beginning With Del-. | Male | French |
| Delia | From Delos | Female | Romanian |
| Della | Bright. Noble. | Female | German |
| Elke | Noble. Variant Of Alice. | Female | German |
| Heidi | Diminutive Of Adelheid, "Little Miss," And Adelaide, "Noble." | Female | Swiss |
Looking for names like Adelaide?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Adelaide to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Adelaide against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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