Adaline
The story
Adaline looks like a modern respelling and is not: about 540 girls a decade carried it in the 1910s and 1920s, when Adalyn counted a few dozen a decade and Adalynn was absent from the record. Then it faded almost to extinction, two dozen in all of the 1970s. The return is precisely datable: about 610 in the 2000s, then 7,700 in the 2010s, the decade a film gave the name to a woman who could not age, and already 8,100 so far this decade, past the full 2010s with years to run. Decade buckets point, they do not convict. One figure is absolute: across the whole record, not one boy, 18,600 girls to zero. Addie and Ada wait inside it, as in the rest of the family. The noble root is Germanic and old; the spelling worries are modern and, on this evidence, worth ignoring.
Adaline around the world
One shared root links 21 names across 3 languages.
Shared root: a Germanic family built on adal "noble": Adalheidis "of noble kind" wore down through Old French Aalis into Alice and a crowd of descendants
The constellation
14 more branches of this family
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Adaline peaked in the 2010s and the 2020s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
118 people · the #36,689 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 1,000,000 · median age 31
Among people named Adaline living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1990s than in any other decade.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
When you meet Adaline
Most people given the name Adaline in the United States are children or teenagers today. The name belongs to this generation.
Estimated from US Social Security birth registrations and typical lifespans; a rough guide, not a rule.
The Adaline deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Adaline truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Adaline fits with your family’s names and surname.
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