Gede is attested as a family and title name attached to individual spirits, Gede Nibo and Gede Zaraignen among them, rather than as one deity's own proper name. A West African, Dahomean origin has been proposed given Haitian Vodou's broader Fon and Kongo ancestry, but no single derivation has become the settled reading.
What would resolve this A linguistic study tracing the word to a specific West African source language, Fon or otherwise, or an early colonial-era or immediate post-colonial record of the term predating its documented use as the spirit family's title.
OpenHaitian Creole linguistics, Africanist studies of Fon and Kongo antecedentsLeslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti