Dee
given name · Latin script
Meaning: person living by the River Dee, or from Welsh dhu ‘black’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/diː/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Dee is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 4.2K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 6.1K
- SGSingapore≈1 in 6.7K
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)
- Sources
- 525 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.2K (inferred from the name graph)
20,339 people, 2020
Highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
person living by the River Dee, or from Welsh dhu ‘black’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Dee, 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 in the world(measured from records)
Dee 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 | #576 | 20,339 | 1 in 16K | 16K | Dee | 525 |
| GB United Kingdom | #621 | ≈9,100 est. | ≈1 in 7.2K | 3 | Dee | 252 |
| CA Canada | #627 | ≈5,400 est. | ≈1 in 7K | 1 | Dee | 172 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈4,700 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Dee | 62 |
| AU Australia | #644 | ≈4,200 est. | ≈1 in 6.1K | 1 | Dee | 177 |
| IE Ireland | #293 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 4.2K | — | Dee | 74 |
| SG Singapore | #420 | ≈930 est. | ≈1 in 6.7K | — | Dee | 51 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈830 est. | ≈1 in 5.9K | — | Dee | 89 |
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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender. 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)
Dee 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, an anglicized form of Welsh dhu ‘black’; first attested Roger Dee 1642 PrD
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
, 3 Pet form of any of the given names beginning with the letter D- (compare Kay), in particular Dorothy. It is also used as an independent name, and may in some cases be associated with the River Dee (compare }Clyde).
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, letter name; also from the initial D
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In English, Indonesian: popular girl's name
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Oscuridad
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
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)
- Dee Brownb. 1908USAmerican writer and historian (1908–2002)
- Dee Wallace-Stoneb. 1948USAmerican actress
- Betsy DeVosb. 1958USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician and philanthropist (born 1958)
- Dee Bradley Bakerb. 1962USAmerican voice actor (born 1962)
- Dee Brownb. 1968USAmerican basketball player (born 1968)
- Gabby Giffordsb. 1970USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician and gun control activist (born 1970)
- Dee Reesb. 1977USAmerican film director, screenwriter
- B.J. Pennb. 1978USnot in their usual nameAmerican mixed martial artist
- Lindsay Lohanb. 1986USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress and singer (born 1986)
- Hayley Westenrab. 1987NZnot in their usual nameNew Zealand singer
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)
Attested in 44 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 7K | #4,881 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 6.3K | #5,535 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6.1K | #5,222 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- 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
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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 are other forms of the name Dee?
- In the etymology graph, Dora, Dorothea and Dolly are forms of the same name in other languages; Doreen, Dorinda and Dorita are recorded short or pet forms; it is recorded as a short form of Dorthy.
- Is Dee a male or female name?
- Dee 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.
- What does the name Dee mean, and where does it come from?
- person living by the River Dee, or from Welsh dhu ‘black’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Dee?
- A machine transcription gives /diː/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Dee have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 20 thousand people named Dee, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dee.
- How common is the name Dee?
- In the United States, the national register counted 20,339 people named Dee in 2020, about 1 in 16 thousand residents.
- How common is Dee compared with other names?
- In the United States, Dee is the 576th most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dee?
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/deeThe 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, “Dee” — the 576th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.