Gertrude is from the Old Germanic gar (spear) + thrudh (strength). A top-25 US baby name from 1880 to 1916. Saint Gertrude the Great (1256-c. 1302) — German Benedictine nun and Christian mystic; the first person to receive the Sacred Heart devotion in a vision (1281); one of only four women called "the Great" in Catholic history. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) — American expatriate writer; her Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus hosted Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald; *"A rose is a rose is a rose" (Sacred Emily, 1913) is among the most-quoted lines in modernist poetry. Gertrude Ederle (1905-2003) — first woman to swim the English Channel (1926) — and she did it 2+ hours faster than any of the five men who had done it before. Gertrude — Queen of Denmark, Hamlet's mother*.
Subject of countless Stein biographies and Tim Dahl's Trudy's Big Swim (2017).
Gertrude is a compound name. Its parts are gair + þrúðr — each an attested element with a recorded meaning of its own.
Gertrude 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 Gertrude reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.