Cadence

About Cadence

Cadence is an English word name meaning “rhythm” or “flow.” Its history is musical and literary: it can describe the movement of a voice or the close of a musical phrase. Pronounced KAY-duns, it has become familiar through both modern naming and the fictional Cadence Sinclair Eastman of We Were Liars.

The word’s journey

English cadence came through French from Italian cadenza, ultimately connected with Latin cadere, “to fall.” The image is of a voice settling or falling at the end of a sentence or passage.

The word was used in English for the rhythmic flow of prose and poetry by the late fourteenth century. Its musical sense later developed around the way a phrase reaches a conclusion.

Cadence became a personal name much more recently, during the twentieth century. Kadence and Kaydence are modern spelling variants that preserve the usual English pronunciation while changing the opening letters.

A musical connection

In tonal music, a cadence helps bring a phrase or larger passage to a close. It involves a recognizable harmonic and melodic pattern, giving the listener a sense of arrival.

That makes the name’s musical association more specific than a general connection with sound. A cadence marks the shape of a passage and helps a listener hear how one part relates to the next.

The word also remains useful outside formal music theory, especially when describing speech or verse. Those overlapping uses give the name connections with both musical performance and the spoken or written voice.

Cadence in We Were Liars

Cadence Sinclair Eastman is the central narrator of E. Lockhart’s novel We Were Liars, published in 2014. The story follows a wealthy family and the summers its younger members spend on a private island.

Cadence’s incomplete memories and the events surrounding a mysterious accident shape the unfolding mystery. Her first-person perspective is central to the book’s treatment of family secrets and the difficulty of reconstructing the past.

Emily Alyn Lind plays Cadence in the Prime Video adaptation. The character gives the name a recognizable contemporary literary and screen identity, separate from its musical word history.

Cadence Brace and tennis

Canadian tennis player Cadence Brace won her first professional singles title at the ITF event in Wichita, Kansas, in 2024. She had made her WTA tour-level debut at Granby in 2022.

Brace was selected for Canada’s Billie Jean King Cup team for the first time in 2025. Her career provides a sporting bearer of the name alongside the fictional Cadence, showing its use beyond the arts.

Pronunciation and related spellings

Cadence has two syllables, KAY-duns, with stress on the first. The opening c has a k sound, while the final ce has an s sound.

Kadence writes the opening consonant directly, and Kaydence makes the long a vowel visible. The full name retains the familiar spelling of the English word.

American popularity

Cadence’s largest American female count and best rank came in 2007, with 1,707 girls and a rank of number 199. By 2025, the count was 245 girls, with a rank of number 1,022.

The name is also recorded for boys. In 2025, 76 boys received it, placing it at number 1,994.

How popular is Cadence?

In 2025, Cadence ranked #1,022 among girls in the United States, with 245 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1974; its largest annual count was 1,707 in 2007. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.