Nèlly

given name · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Nèlly is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ecuador than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Shortened from Nelly Duff, for puff, i.e. breath of life.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 17K(measured from records)
  • ECEcuador1 in 449
  • SESweden1 in 2K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Ecuador (measured from records)

37,686 people, 2024

Sources
344 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 449 (inferred from the name graph)

Ecuador

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Nelly in US United States, CM Cameroon.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Shortened from Nelly Duff, for puff, i.e. breath of life.

Sources 4

Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Nèlly counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Nèlly is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
EC Ecuador—37,6861 in 44938K—16
US United States—19,4161 in 17K19KNelly226
SE Sweden—5,0861 in 2K5.1K—12
CZ Czechia—2,0421 in 5.2K2K——
BR Brazil—1,9951 in 106K2.2K——
CR Costa Rica—1,7231 in 3K1.7K——
NO Norway—1,0651 in 5.1K3.2K—7
CM Cameroon#251≈20 est.≈1 in 1.4M—Nelly18

37,686 people counted by INEC — civil registry names, 2024. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: INEC — civil registry names; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); MVČR — living population register 2017; TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Nèlly is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name39 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Philippines, South Africa, Germany

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Nelly, Nelly'S, Nëlly, Nêlly, Nëllÿ

  • a separate given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Bolivia, Peru, United Kingdom

    Also written Nelly, Nëllÿ, Něllý

1 further group record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Nèlly under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Nèlly mean, and where does it come from?
Shortened from Nelly Duff, for puff, i.e. breath of life. Recorded by DUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen and Wiktionary and 2 other sources.
Is Nèlly a male or female name?
Nèlly is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
In which country does Nèlly have the most bearers?
In Ecuador, the national register counted about 38 thousand people named Nèlly, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Nèlly most common?
Nèlly is densest in Ecuador, where the national register counts about 1 in 449 people carrying it.
How common is the name Nèlly?
In Ecuador, the national register counted 37,686 people named Nèlly in 2024, about 1 in 449 residents.
How common is Nèlly compared with other names?
In Cameroon, Nèlly is the 251st most common given name of 9,064 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Nèlly?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/n%C3%A8lly

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Nèlly” — the 251st most common given name in Cameroon. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Nèlly parses inside a full name →