Bai
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘White’. Li Bai (701-762) was a famous Tang poet
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/baj/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In India it is the 42nd most common surname.
- CNChina≈1 in 1.7K(inferred from the name graph)
- PKPakistan≈1 in 23K
- USUnited States1 in 12Kas Bui
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 Bai 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #257 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 176 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.7K (inferred from the name graph)
≈820,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
China, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Bayon in US United States.
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)
‘White’. Li Bai (701-762) was a famous Tang poet. This name is also pronounced ‘Bo’. Baozhai ° ‘Precious hairpin’.
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bai 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈820,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | — | Bai | 100 |
| US United States | — | 28,919as Bui | 1 in 12K | 35K | Bayon | 176 |
| BD Bangladesh | #366 | ≈27,000 est. | ≈1 in 6.1K | — | Bai | 13 |
| IN India | #42 | 17,011as Bay | 1 in 78K | 17K | Bai | 134 |
| PK Pakistan | #434 | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Bai | 31 |
| NO Norway | — | 4,774as Bye | 1 in 1.1K | 4.8K | — | 4 |
| CI Côte d’Ivoire | — | ≈4,200 est. | ≈1 in 6.5K | 7K | — | — |
| DK Denmark | — | 1,837as Bay | 1 in 3.2K | 11K | — | 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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)
Bai 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.
In Italian, forma plural de Baio
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In English, lang., China
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Russian, "speak."
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
In pag, grandmother
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In ski, woman
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)
- Paek Nam-sunb. 1929KPnot in their usual nameNorth Korean diplomat (1929-2007)
- Bae Jong-okb. 1964KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress
- Bai Lingb. 1966CNChinese-American actress
- Bae Yong-joonb. 1972KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actor and businessman
- Baek Ji-youngb. 1976KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean singer
- Bae Doonab. 1979KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress
- Baek Jin-heeb. 1990KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress
- Ireneb. 1991KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean singer and actress
- Bae Suzyb. 1994KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean singer and actress (born 1994)
- Chae Soo-binb. 1994KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress
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)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 55 sources across 29 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 15K | #97 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 5.5K | #1,458 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 5.2K | #6,341 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3.1K | #10,237 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.6K | #16,202 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 144 | #3,757 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 122 | #12,893 |
Reference works 6
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
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
- Where does the name Bai come from?
- ‘White’. Li Bai (701-762) was a famous Tang poet. This name is also pronounced ‘Bo’. Baozhai ° ‘Precious hairpin’. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- How do you pronounce Bai?
- A machine transcription gives /baj/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- What does the name Bai mean?
- Recorded meaning: ‘White’. Li Bai (701-762) was a famous Tang poet.
- In which country does Bai have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 819 thousand people named Bai in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bai.
- How common is the name Bai?
- In the United States, the national register counted 28,919 people named Bui in 2010, about 1 in 12 thousand residents.
- How common is Bai compared with other names?
- In India, Bai is the 42nd most common surname of 1,492,515 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bai?
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/baiThe 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, “Bai” — the 42nd most common surname in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.