Gertrude
- Pronunciation
- [Ger-trude]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- From The Protected Farm
- Origin
- German
About the Name Gertrude
Gertrude is a name of Old High German origin built from ger ("spear") and trud ("strength"), yielding the meaning "spear strength" — though it is commonly rendered as "from the protected farm" or "strong spear." The name was borne by a seventh-century Belgian saint, Gertrude of Nivelles, which ensured its spread across Catholic Europe. It arrived in England via the Normans and remained in steady if modest use until its Victorian revival, when it became fashionable as a robust, literary-sounding Germanic name.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer, art collector, and salonnière whose Paris apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became the meeting ground for early-twentieth-century modernism. Her experimental prose, including the work, placed her at the centre of the literary and artistic avant-garde, and her name became inseparable from that defining cultural moment.
Gertrude appears in the US Social Security top-1000 from 1880 and peaked at #22 in 1906. It exited the top-1000 in 1930 at rank #96, closing a 50-year chart run during which it registered over 149,000 top-1000 births. It does not appear in the top-1000 SSA top-1000 after 1930 — a marker of rarity rather than disuse. Recorded variants include the friendly shortenings Trude, Trudi, and Trudy.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Gertrude
US Popularity History (1880–1930)
Annual US births named Gertrude by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1917 with 6,300 girls named Gertrude (girl rank #37 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1930, ranked #96 for girls (2,555 US births). That's 59 places below its 1917 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 Gertrude Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 1935–1944 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 Gertrude the strongest states are New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Hampshire | #82 | 64 |
| 2 | Vermont | #83 | 26 |
| 3 | Rhode Island | #87 | 50 |
| 4 | Connecticut | #93 | 70 |
| 5 | New Jersey | #93 | 174 |
| 6 | Maine | #94 | 89 |
| 7 | Maryland | #95 | 120 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maryland | #95 | 120 |
| 2 | Maine | #94 | 89 |
| 3 | New Jersey | #93 | 174 |
| 4 | Connecticut | #93 | 70 |
| 5 | Rhode Island | #87 | 50 |
| 6 | Vermont | #83 | 26 |
| 7 | New Hampshire | #82 | 64 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 1935–1944. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Gertrude in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trude | Fighting Woman | Female | German |
Famous People Named Gertrude
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Gertrude.
- Gertrude Stein was a modern American writer.
Looking for names like Gertrude?
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 Gertrude to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Gertrude 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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