Frederic
A Germanic name meaning "peaceful ruler". Only 133 men in Poland carry it and none have arrived in recent years, so most Poles will never meet one.
Frederic Pronunciation
Frederic is pronounced fre-DE-reets (/frɛˈdɛrit͡s/).
What Frederic means
Where Frederic comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Frederic grows from two Germanic words. The first, frithu, meant peace. The second, rīk, meant ruler or king. Joined, they give the sense printed on any Polish document today: peaceful ruler, władca pokoju.
French speakers reshaped the name into Frédéric, and France did much to send it across Europe. For Poles the great bearer wrote it in both languages. Fryderyk Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola near Warsaw in 1810 to a French father, Nicolas, and on his French scores he signed himself Frédéric.
Other Frédérics left large marks. Frédéric Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty. Frédéric Mistral won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904 for his poems in Provençal.
A Polish child called Frederic sits a little apart in the class register, the French spelling among the Fryderyks. The name still holds what the Germanic form held: a ruler who keeps the peace.
How many people are named Frederic
1 in 160498 men in Poland is named Frederic. 133 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2877 among male names.