Andrae is a variant of Andrew, from Greek Andreas, meaning "manly" or "brave."
Andrae is a stylized, distinctly American spelling variant of André, the French form of the Greek Andreios — meaning 'manly' or 'courageous.' While André itself arrived in England and America with French Huguenot settlers and later through nineteenth-century francophile naming fashions, the Andrae spelling represents a creative re-spelling that emerged particularly within African American naming traditions of the late twentieth century, where phonetic respelling was used both to individualize a name and to signal a cultural break from European orthographic conventions. The name's most celebrated bearer in this spelling is Andraé Crouch, the pioneering gospel musician whose compositions — 'Through It All,' 'My Tribute,' 'Soon and Very Soon' — became cornerstones of modern gospel music and crossed into mainstream pop and soul.
Crouch's influence was enormous enough that his spelling of the name carries genuine cultural weight in African American Christian communities. Andrae sits in a productive tension between its classical roots and its modern re-imagining. The final -ae suffix echoes both Latin ablative endings and a kind of decorative flourish that sets it apart from the plainer Andre.
It is a name that announces it has been considered — not merely inherited — which gives it a quality of intention that parents often find appealing. It bridges Greek antiquity, French elegance, and American innovation in a single six-letter word.