Adey is a short, modern personal form related to names with Ade-, used across English and Arabic-influenced naming as a compact given name.
Adey is above all an Ethiopian name, and in Ethiopia it carries the golden image of a specific flower: Adey Abeba ("father's flower" or "Adey's flower" in Amharic), the bright yellow daisy-like bloom — botanically Bidens macroptera — that erupts across the Ethiopian highlands at the end of the rainy season in September, announcing the arrival of the Ethiopian New Year, Enkutatash. To be named Adey is to carry within one's name an entire season's turning, a national moment of joy and renewal celebrated with children carrying bouquets of these yellow flowers from house to house.
The name has been used for girls in Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa for generations, associated with brightness, seasonal joy, and the particular beauty of the natural world renewing itself after months of rain. It appears in Ethiopian poetry and song as a symbol of hope and celebration, the flower that tells the people the long wait is over. In Eritrea and among the Ethiopian diaspora in the United States, Israel, Sweden, and elsewhere, Adey has spread as a name that carries deep cultural memory in a compact, accessible form.
The name also exists in other traditions — as a Welsh and English diminutive of Ada or Adelaide, carrying the Germanic meaning "noble" — but in contemporary usage it is predominantly associated with its Ethiopian identity. It is a name of two syllables that contains a landscape, a season, and a collective memory of renewal.