Gerda
Around 1,300 Polish women carry it, and not one newborn girl has been given it this century: it's a name you'd almost never meet today. Germanic at root, from a word for an enclosure, a place of shelter and protection.
Gerda Pronunciation
Gerda is pronounced GER-dah (/ˈgɛrda/).
What Gerda means
Where Gerda comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Gerda grew from Germanic soil, and its oldest kernel points to an enclosure, a fenced space meant to keep something safe. The same root sits inside garðr, the Old Norse word for a walled yard. In the Poetic Edda a giantess called Gerðr is courted by the god Freyr, and her name belongs to that family of guarded ground.
The name travels with longer cousins. In Poland you meet Gertruda and Gertrud on the same branch, and Gerda reads as their trimmer, more northern form.
Protection is the thread that holds all of this together. Picture a class register at a Polish szkoła podstawowa, where Gerda sits among the Zosias and Antonis, short and a little foreign to the ear. The sense of safety here was not pinned on later. It is there in the first syllable, the enclosure that gives Gerda its meaning: shelter, a guarded place.
How many people are named Gerda
1 in 17118 women in Poland is named Gerda. 1,317 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #841 among female names.
Gerda as a middle name
Gerda is a first name for 1,317 women in Poland and a middle name for another 463, a 74/26 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 326th, between Erna (463) and Marietta (460).
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324
464Paola
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325
463Erna
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326463Gerda
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327
460Marietta
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328
448Sylwestra