Sade is a short form of the Yoruba name Folashade (or sometimes Sandé) — meaning "honour confers a crown" or "crown is honour." The full Yoruba name carries the weight of a noble or royal lineage.
The British-Nigerian singer Sade Adu (born 1959), lead vocalist of the band Sade, gave the name international currency in the 1980s with songs like "Smooth Operator." The name is now used across the African diaspora and is rising in Western records.
Sade 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 Sade reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.