Bernadine is the feminine of Bernard — from the Old Germanic bern ("bear") + hard ("brave, strong") — "brave as a bear." A top-200 US baby name from 1910 to 1945. Bernadine "Bernie" Harris — central character of Terry McMillan's bestselling novel Waiting to Exhale (1992) and the 1995 film adaptation directed by Forest Whitaker, where she was played by Angela Bassett; Bernadine's scene burning her unfaithful husband's car and possessions became one of the most-iconic moments in 1990s American cinema and a cultural touchstone for women's empowerment. Saint Bernardino of Siena is the male form. Bernardine is also a variant spelling.
Bernadine does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Bernadine reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.