Geraldine
- Pronunciation
- [Ge-ral-dine]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Mighty With A Spear. Rules By The Spear. Feminine Of Gerald.
- Origin
- German
About the Name Geraldine
Geraldine is the feminine form of the Germanic name Gerald, built on the elements ger (spear) and wald (rule) — conveying the sense of one who rules by the spear. The feminine suffix -ine, common in French and English name-formation, transformed the warrior-flavoured masculine into an elegant, three-syllable name with genuine literary pedigree: the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the name to an enigmatic figure in his unfinished poem Christabel, lending it a haunting, otherworldly resonance that lingered in popular culture long after the poem's composition.
No famous bearers are documented for this name, so its cultural profile is best understood through the patterns of its popularity. Geraldine was very much a name of the interwar and early postwar decades, carrying the double-barrelled confidence of a long Germanic root dressed in French finery — a combination that appealed widely to English-speaking parents of that era.
In the US Social Security top-1000, Geraldine first entered the top-1000 in 1916 and climbed to its peak of #38 in 1931, with nearly 160,000 top-1000 births over its charted span. It demonstrated exceptional longevity, remaining traceable on the chart all the way to 2012, when it registered 254 births at #995. That nearly century-long arc marks it as one of the more durable feminine names of the twentieth century. Recorded nickname and variant forms include Dina, Jerrie, and Jerry.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Geraldine
US Popularity History (1916–2012)
Annual US births named Geraldine by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1930 with 5,448 girls named Geraldine (girl rank #43 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2012, ranked #995 for girls (254 US births). That's 952 places below its 1930 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
Looking for names like Geraldine?
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Compare Geraldine to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Geraldine against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).