Meaning and history
Candace comes from the hereditary title of the queens of Ethiopia mentioned in Acts in the New Testament, apparently derived from Meroitic kdke meaning “queen mother.” In some Bible versions it appears as Kandake, reflecting the Greek spelling Κανδάκη. The name was adopted as a given name by Puritans after the Protestant Reformation, used by William Faulkner for a character in The Sound and the Fury (1929), and popularized in the 20th century by a character in the 1942 movie Meet the Stewarts.
20062006: 249 births, rank #1,026
2007: 254 births, rank #1,037
2008: 217 births, rank #1,180
2009: 198 births, rank #1,246
2010: 133 births, rank #1,621
20112011: 141 births, rank #1,554
2012: 101 births, rank #1,940
2013: 99 births, rank #1,977
2014: 121 births, rank #1,728
2015: 92 births, rank #2,103
20162016: 101 births, rank #1,972
2017: 77 births, rank #2,357
2018: 64 births, rank #2,677
2019: 60 births, rank #2,784
2020: 69 births, rank #2,500
20212021: 64 births, rank #2,674
2022: 66 births, rank #2,639
2023: 54 births, rank #3,047
2024: 42 births, rank #3,639
20252025: 50 births, rank #3,167
Candace moved from #817 to #926 for girls between 2004 and 2005. Its highest annual birth count came in 1982, with 2,848 births.