Brad: Meaning of Baby Name Brad

About the Name Brad

Brad is an English short form and given name derived from the Old English elements brād meaning "broad" combined with the toponymic sense of valley — the full meaning being "from the broad valley." It belongs to the same Old English place-name family as Bradford and Bradley, surnames that transferred to first-name use across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States, Brad established itself as a standalone given name rather than a mere nickname, carrying the clipped, athletic quality that made single-syllable masculine names fashionable in the post-war decades.

The name's cultural profile is closely associated with the latter half of the twentieth century, and its most prominent bearer reinforces that association. Brad Pitt, born 1963, is an American actor and producer whose four-decade career includes a 2020 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award win for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Brad Douglas Paisley is an American country singer, songwriter, and guitarist born in Glen Dale, West Virginia, in 1972, who received his first guitar from his maternal grandfather at the age of eight and was performing publicly from an early age.

Brad first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 1975, the same year it hit its peak rank of #98. It accumulated 4,468 top-1000 births over its tracked run before exiting the charts after 2007, when it ranked #954 with 206 births. The name belongs firmly to the late-twentieth-century masculine naming wave and now reads as decidedly generational. The recorded spelling variant is Bradd.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.

Quick Facts About Brad

5,642

English baby names in our dictionary

3,391

English male names

91

4-letter B-names in our dictionary

783

B-male names total

1975–2007

years of US SSA records (9 total)

4,468

total US births named Brad (all years)

US Popularity History (1975–2007)

📉 Falling fast: Brad dropped 205 places in the US boys ranking over the last 5 years (#749 in 2002 → #954 in 2007).

Annual US births named Brad by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1975 with 2,610 boys named Brad (boy rank #98 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2007, ranked #954 for boys (206 US births). That's 856 places below its 1975 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.

Variant Forms

Name	Meaning	Gender	Origin
Bradd	Broad: Wide.	Male	English

Famous People Named Brad

2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Brad.

Brad Douglas Paisley is an American singer-songwriter and musician.
Brad Pitt — Movie Actor (1963)

Browse more famous Brads and similar first names →

Looking for names like Brad?

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Compare Brad to Other Popular Names

Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Brad against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).

Brad vs Liam 239,320 births since 2014

Brad vs Noah 230,181 births since 2014

Brad vs Oliver 164,076 births since 2014

Brad vs William 159,918 births since 2014

Brad vs James 157,850 births since 2014

Brad vs Elijah 153,351 births since 2014

Brad vs Benjamin 147,449 births since 2014

Brad vs Lucas 141,302 births since 2014

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