Dale
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Dale is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Vietnam it is the 20th most common given name. Recorded meaning: Person who lives in a valley; from Middle English dale, ultimately Old English or reinforced by Old Norse.
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 954(inferred from the name graph)
- CACanada≈1 in 964
- CNChina≈1 in 1K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Dale itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #342 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 575 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 954 (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,400,000 people, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
New Zealand, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Duy in VN Vietnam and Htoo in MM Myanmar (Burma).
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Person who lives in a valley; from Middle English dale, ultimately Old English or reinforced by Old Norse.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Dale counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈1,400,000 est. | ≈1 in 1K | — | Dale | 28 |
| VN Vietnam | #20 | ≈620,000 est. | ≈1 in 160 | 105 | Duy | 236 |
| US United States | #169 | 188,893 | 1 in 1.8K | 173K | Dale | 575 |
| GB United Kingdom | #221 | ≈53,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.2K | 1.3K | Dale | 269 |
| MM Myanmar (Burma) | — | ≈45,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | listed | Htoo | 80 |
| CA Canada | #150 | ≈39,000 est. | ≈1 in 964 | 3 | Dale | 281 |
| SG Singapore | #88 | ≈5,600 est. | ≈1 in 1.1K | — | Dale | 46 |
| NZ New Zealand | #151 | ≈5,200 est. | ≈1 in 954 | 12 | Dale | 120 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; The page provides an analysis of the performance of Vietnamese surname lists in identifying Vietnamese individuals for r; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Dale is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, ‘dweller in the dale’, from OE dæl; first attested Ralph de la Dale 1275 RH (Sf)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Old English/Teutonic: a valley dweller, boy or girl.
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
,2 Transferred use of the surname, originally a local name for someone who lived in a dale or valley. It is now fairly commonly used as a given name, especially in North America, along with other monosyllabic surnames of topographical origin (see for example pDell and pHale).
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, A valley, often in an otherwise hilly area.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Romanian, subst., dialectal jele. 1. Jalea, sculptorul. 2. Jedu, G., dobr. (RI XI 204); Jdliu (ib. 208). 3. Jele pren. (Br 44) ; Jelea, act., Bucuresti. 4. Jelic, Ienachi (AO X 382). 5. Jelie, olt. Pentru formele 2-4 cf. si sl. U4' EAHMHP si blg. Meabo (Weig).
as a nameDictionar Onomastic Rominesc
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Dale Carnegieb. 1888USAmerican writer and lecturer (1888-1955)
- Buddy Bakerb. 1918USnot in their usual nameAmerican composer, big band arranger, orchestra leader (1918-2002)
- Dale Robertsonb. 1923USAmerican actor (1923-2013)
- Sandy Dennisb. 1937USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress (1937–1992)
- Dale T. Mortensenb. 1939USAmerican economist (1939–2014)
- Dairu Chifūrib. 1941USnot in their usual nameAmerican glass sculptor (born 1941)
- Dale Dyeb. 1944USAmerican actor, presenter, and businessman
- Greg Bearb. 1951USnot in their usual nameAmerican writer best known for science fiction (1951–2022)
- Mike Huckabeeb. 1955USnot in their usual nameGovernor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007
- Dale Ellisb. 1960USAmerican basketball player (born 1960)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 83 sources across 39 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 173K | #296 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 16K | #296 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 129 | — |
| NZ New Zealand | DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present) | 1996 | 12 | — |
| NZ New Zealand | DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present) | 1980 | 10 | — |
| CA Canada | Statistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01) | 2024 | 7 | — |
| CA Canada | Statistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01) | 2020 | 6 | — |
| CA Canada | Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender | 2024 | 1 | #2,319 |
Reference works 7
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Dale mean, and where does it come from?
- Person who lives in a valley; from Middle English dale, ultimately Old English or reinforced by Old Norse. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Is Dale a male or female name?
- Dale is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Dale have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.4 million people named Dale in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dale.
- How common is the name Dale?
- In the United States, the national register counted 188,893 people named Dale in 2020, about 1 in 1.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Dale compared with other names?
- In Vietnam, Dale is the 20th most common given name of 73,918 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dale?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/daleThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), and bulk access is licensed separately.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Dale” — the 20th most common given name in Vietnam. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.