Fred
- Pronunciation
- [Fred]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Variant Of Frederick Peaceful Ruler.
- Origin
- German
About the Name Fred
Fred is the short form of Frederick, a name of Old High German origin built from fridu ("peace") and rīhhi ("ruler, power"), yielding the compound sense of "peaceful ruler." Although Fred began as a nickname, it functioned as an independent given name throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when short, unpretentious masculine names — Frank, Fred, George, Joe — dominated American birth registers with a democratic plainness that suited the era.
Two celebrated Freds shaped the name's mid-century associations. Fred Perry was an English tennis player and table-tennis champion who in 1934 became the first British man to win the Wimbledon men's singles championship in 25 years, a feat as standing for decades. Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist topical humor made his weekly radio program one of the most-listened-to broadcasts in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s — born John Florence Sullivan, he adopted the name that would define American radio comedy for a generation.
Fred appears in the US Social Security top-1000 from 1880, the earliest year tracked, and reached its best rank of #14 in 1885. It held remarkably consistent presence on the charts for over a century, last appearing in 2002 at rank #875. Recorded variants are Freddie and Freddy, both of which have seen renewed use as vintage nickname-names gain traction in contemporary naming culture.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Fred
US Popularity History (1880–2002)
Annual US births named Fred by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1924 with 6,532 boys named Fred (boy rank #32 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2002, ranked #875 for boys (187 US births). That's 843 places below its 1924 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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Variant Forms
Famous People Named Fred
2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Fred.
- Fred Allen was an American comedian.
- Fred Perry was an English tennis and table tennis player.
Looking for names like Fred?
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 Fred to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Fred against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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