Wade
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Either from a place-name meaning 'by a ford' / 'from Wade' (Old English gewæd 'ford'), or from the medieval personal name Wade, ultimately from Old English wadan 'to go' (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 38 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
/wed/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Wade is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 97,040 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- SNSenegal≈1 in 310few records(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 2.8K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 3K
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 Wade 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- #910 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 548 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 307 (inferred from the name graph)
97,040 people, 2010
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Senegal, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Wade
- English:/wed/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Either from a place-name meaning 'by a ford' / 'from Wade' (Old English gewæd 'ford'), or from the medieval personal name Wade, ultimately from Old English wadan 'to go'.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Wade, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where the surname Wade is found
(measured from records)Wade 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #261 | 97,040 | 1 in 3.4K | 97K | Wade | 548 |
| SN Senegal | #265 | ≈60,000 est. | ≈1 in 307 | 33 | Wade | 39 |
| GB United Kingdom | #289 | ≈23,000 est. | ≈1 in 3K | 3 | Wade | 250 |
| CA Canada | #364 | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | 6 | Wade | 211 |
| AU Australia | #348 | ≈7,900 est. | ≈1 in 3.4K | 76 | Wade | 202 |
| NZ New Zealand | #274 | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 2.8K | 11 | Wade | 99 |
| GY Guyana | — | 224 | 1 in 3.3K | 224 | — | 7 |
97,040 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; DGE — candidate declarations, 41 party/coalition lists (legislatives anticipees 17 Nov 2024). 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)Wade 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, from OE Wada, from wadan 'to go', or Old Germanic Wado; first attested Wada, Wade, Wado 1066 DB.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
Transferred use of the surname, in origin either a local name from the medieval vocabulary word wade ‘ford’ (old English (ge)wed), or else from a medieval given name representing a survival of Old English Wada, a derivative of wadan ‘to go’, borne, according to legend, by a great sea-giant. used in Scotland, being bestowed in honour of the Scottish patriot William Wallace (?1272-1305).
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, to walk through water or something that impedes progress.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, In the Oriel counties MacWade is a corruption of MacQuaid; elsewhere Wade is of dual derivation—Old-English waddan. to go, and Norman-French wade, ford—and has been found in all the provinces since the thirteenth century. MIF
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
English: transferred use of the surname, which is derived either from a medieval given name or from the medieval vocabulary word wade ford. The former represents an Old English personal name, derived from wadan to go, which according to legend was borne by a great sea-giant.
as a word
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)- Abdoulaye Wadeb. 1926SN3rd President of Senegal
- Virginia Wadeb. 1945GBBritish tennis player
- Dwyane Wadeb. 1982USAmerican basketball player (born 1982)
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).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)70 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 38 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Wade mean, and where does it come from?
- Either from a place-name meaning 'by a ford' / 'from Wade' (Old English gewæd 'ford'), or from the medieval personal name Wade, ultimately from Old English wadan 'to go'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Wade?
- In English /wed/ (Wiktionary).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Wade?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 97 thousand people named Wade, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled wade. After it come Senegal, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Wade?
- In the United States, the national register counted 97,040 people named Wade in 2010, about 1 in 3.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Wade compared with other names?
- In the United States, Wade is the 261st most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Wade?
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/wadeThe 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), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
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, “Wade” — ranked 297th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.