Dée

surname · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Dée is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Hokkien 李 (Lí), via English Dee, with the initial ⟨L⟩ changed to ⟨D⟩ due to /l/~/d/ allophony when the proceeding vowel is either, [i], [e], or [u] in Philippine Hokkien.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 16K(measured from records)
  • SESweden1 in 99K
  • NLNetherlands1 in 112K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

20,339 people, 2020

Sources
125 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 16K (inferred from the name graph)

United States

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Dee in US United States, GA Gabon, CD Congo - Kinshasa.

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)

Derivation of Dée: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Dée
  1. Hokkien李Lí(measured from records)
  2. EnglishDee(measured from records)

From Hokkien 李 (Lí), via English Dee, with the initial ⟨L⟩ changed to ⟨D⟩ due to /l/~/d/ allophony when the proceeding vowel is either, [i], [e], or [u] in Philippine Hokkien.

Sources 5

  • 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
  • A concise dictionary of first names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Wiktionary
  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Dée 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.

Where Dée is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—20,3391 in 16K16KDee92
NL Netherlands—1541 in 112K250—5
SE Sweden—1031 in 99K103—1
CD Congo - Kinshasa—≈86 est.≈1 in 1.2M—Dee2
FI Finland—171 in 328K45——
DK Denmark—101 in 587K10——
GA Gabon#378———Dee4

20,339 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Dée is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name94 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada

    Languages: English, German, Japanese

    Also written Dee, Dëë, Dee', Déé, Dêê

  • Spanish given name11 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Philippines, Argentina, Colombia

    Also written Dee, Déé, Dèè, Dëë, D'Ee

  • Lao given name14 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Laos, United States, Thailand, United Kingdom

    Languages: Lao, Thai

    Also written Dee, Déé, Dèè, เดเอ, Dëë

  • Portuguese given name15 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Brazil, Philippines, Portugal

    Also written Dee, Déé, Dêe, Deé, Deê

3 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Dée is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Irish, nominative plural of dia

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In nrm, thimble

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 2 sources across 1 country.

Reference works 1

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007

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 Dée mean, and where does it come from?
From Hokkien 李 (Lí), via English Dee, with the initial ⟨L⟩ changed to ⟨D⟩ due to /l/~/d/ allophony when the proceeding vowel is either, [i], [e], or [u] in Philippine Hokkien. Recorded by 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado and A concise dictionary of first names and 3 other sources.
In which country does Dée have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 20 thousand people named Dée, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dee.
Where is Dée most common?
Dée is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 16 thousand people carrying it.
How common is the name Dée?
In the United States, the national register counted 20,339 people named Dée in 2020, about 1 in 16 thousand residents.
How common is Dée compared with other names?
In Gabon, Dée is the 378th most common given name of 2,821 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Dée?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/d%C3%A9e

The 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, “Dée” — the 378th most common given name in Gabon. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Dée parses inside a full name →