Nélly
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Nélly 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.
- 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)
- Sources
- 344 (measured from records)
- 1 in 449 (inferred from the name graph)
37,686 people, 2024
Highest-authority source
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
- DUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
- Wiktionary
- Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios
- Nordic Names
Attested across 20 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nélly 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC Ecuador | — | 37,686 | 1 in 449 | 38K | — | 16 |
| US United States | — | 19,416 | 1 in 17K | 19K | Nelly | 226 |
| SE Sweden | — | 5,086 | 1 in 2K | 5.1K | — | 12 |
| CZ Czechia | — | 2,042 | 1 in 5.2K | 2K | — | — |
| BR Brazil | — | 1,995 | 1 in 106K | 2.2K | — | — |
| CR Costa Rica | — | 1,723 | 1 in 3K | 1.7K | — | — |
| NO Norway | — | 1,065 | 1 in 5.1K | 3.2K | — | 7 |
| CM Cameroon | #251 | ≈20 est. | ≈1 in 1.4M | — | Nelly | 18 |
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nélly 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 Nélly a male or female name?
- Nélly 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 Nélly have the most bearers?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted about 38 thousand people named Nélly, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Nélly most common?
- Nélly is densest in Ecuador, where the national register counts about 1 in 449 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Nélly?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 37,686 people named Nélly in 2024, about 1 in 449 residents.
- How common is Nélly compared with other names?
- In Cameroon, Nélly is the 251st most common given name of 9,064 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nélly?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/n%C3%A9llyThe 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, “Nélly” — the 251st most common given name in Cameroon. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.