Caoimhe
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Recently popular; means 'gentle, graceful beauty'
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Caoimhe is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ireland than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 3.9K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 128K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 125K
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.
- Ireland (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 127 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.9K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,300 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Recently popular; means 'gentle, graceful beauty'.
Sources 1
- Irish first names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Caoimhe 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IE Ireland | #277 | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | 226 | Caoimhe | 103 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈520 est. | ≈1 in 128K | 28 | Caoimhe | 127 |
| US United States | — | 290 | 1 in 1.1M | 286 | Caoimhe | 117 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 125K | 3 | Caoimhe | 62 |
| FR France | — | ≈40 est. | ≈1 in 1.7M | — | Caoimhe | 44 |
| DK Denmark | — | 12 | 1 in 489K | 12 | — | — |
| IS Iceland | — | 1 | 1 in 351K | 1 | — | — |
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: CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present); NISRA — Baby names Northern Ireland full list (1997–present); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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)
Caoimhe is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Pronounced Key-vuh. A name that has recently gained in popularity and which means ‘gentle, graceful beauty’. Anglicised spellings include Keavy or Keava.
as a nameIrish first names
? Irish Gaelic name, pronounced ‘kee-va’, from a vocabulary word meaning ‘gentleness’, ‘loveliness’, or ‘grace’.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
Irish Gaelic: modern name representing the abstract noun derived from the vocabulary word caomh kind, gentle (earlier ‘beloved’ or ‘beautiful’; cf. KEVIN ).
as a word
In Irish, gentleness, mildness, sweetness
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Scottish Gaelic, comparative degree of caomh
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Caoimhe Butterlyb. 1978IEIrish activist and psychotherapist
- Caoimhe Archibaldb. 1981GBIrish Sinn Féin politician (born 1981)
- Caoimhe Perdueb. 2000IEIrish field hockey player
- Caoimhe O'Brienb. 2002IEIrish cyclist
- Caoimhe MarshallIEIrish researcher
- Caoimhe Ní ChathailIEIrish broadcaster
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 27 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2011 | 398 | #14 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2006 | 363 | #15 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2007 | 361 | #17 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2004 | 357 | #12 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2003 | 357 | #12 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2008 | 355 | #16 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2005 | 345 | #17 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2012 | 334 | #16 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2009 | 326 | #21 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2010 | 323 | #24 |
| IE Ireland | CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present) | 2013 | 292 | #19 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 286 | #30,168 |
Reference works 2
- 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 Caoimhe mean, and where does it come from?
- Recently popular; means 'gentle, graceful beauty'. Recorded by Irish first names.
- Is Caoimhe a male or female name?
- Caoimhe 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 Caoimhe have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.3 thousand people named Caoimhe in Ireland, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled caoimhe.
- What are other forms of the name Caoimhe?
- In the etymology graph, Keeva is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How common is the name Caoimhe?
- In the United States, the national register counted 290 people named Caoimhe in 2020, about 1 in 1.1 million residents.
- How common is Caoimhe compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Caoimhe is the 277th most common given name of 14,976 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Caoimhe?
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/caoimheThe 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, “Caoimhe” — the 277th most common given name in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.