Nelly
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: A person's life
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/neli/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Nelly is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Peru than in any other country, where it is the 99th most common given name.
- ECEcuador1 in 449(measured from records)
- PEPeru≈1 in 530
- VEVenezuela≈1 in 707
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Nelly itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Peru (inferred from the name graph)
- 6 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 325 (measured from records)
- 1 in 449 (inferred from the name graph)
≈60,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
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 נלי in FR France and Նելլի in AM Armenia.
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)
A person's life.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 22 languages in the etymology graph.
How Nelly is read(measured from records)
Nelly is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 3 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Spanish62%
Hypocoristic of Elena, Eleonora or Cornelia.
as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios
- French13%
Forme anglo-saxonne d’Hélène, du grec, « éclat du soleil ».
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
Diminutive of names ending in -nel/-nella, especially Hélène or Cornelia.
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
- English9.9%
A person's life.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nelly 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PE Peru | #99 | ≈60,000 est. | ≈1 in 530 | — | Nelly | 81 |
| CO Colombia | #170 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 954 | 21 | Nelly | 115 |
| FR France | — | ≈41,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | 70K | נלי | 6 |
| VE Venezuela | #139 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 707 | — | Nelly | 53 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.8K | — | Nelly | 52 |
| EC Ecuador | #96 | 37,686 | 1 in 449 | 38K | Nelly | 46 |
| AM Armenia | #57 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 278 | 108 | Նելլի | 44 |
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: INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); the co-datosgov-candidates register; INEC — civil registry names; Statistical Committee of the Republic of Armenia — Most Frequent Newborn Given Names by Sex, Armenian script, 2008-2020 + 2023. 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Nelly is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, Nelly Sachs, deutsche Lyrikerin
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Nelly Sachsb. 1891DEJewish German poet and playwright (1891-1970)
- Nelly van Doesburgb. 1899NLDutch musician, dancer and artist (1899-1975)
- Nelly Dienerb. 1912CHSwiss flight attendant (1912-1934)
- Nelly Sethnab. 1932INIndian textile artist
- Christine Boissonb. 1956FRnot in their usual nameFrench actress (1956–2024)
- Nelly Ciobanub. 1974MDMoldovan singer
- Nelly Furtadob. 1978CAPortuguese-Canadian singer and songwriter
- Nelly Tagarb. 1982ILIsraeli actress
- Nelly Kordab. 1998USAmerican golfer
- Nelly Buchetactress
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 102 sources across 56 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024) | 2024 | 70K | #756 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — civil registry names | 2024 | 38K | #45 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 2024 | 28 | — |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 21 | #100 |
Reference works 3
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nelly mean, and where does it come from?
- A person's life. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Is Nelly a male or female name?
- Nelly 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.
- What are other forms of the name Nelly?
- In the etymology graph, Elena, Helen and Ellen are forms of the same name in other languages; it is recorded as a short form of Ellie and Nell.
- In which country does Nelly have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 60 thousand people named Nelly in Peru, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nelly.
- Where is Nelly most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Nelly is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 449 people — even though Peru holds more of our records for it.
- How do you pronounce Nelly?
- A machine transcription gives /neli/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- How common is the name Nelly?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 37,686 people named Nelly in 2024, about 1 in 449 residents.
- How common is Nelly compared with other names?
- In Peru, Nelly is the 99th most common given name of 254,284 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nelly?
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/nellyThe 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, “Nelly” — the 99th most common given name in Peru. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.