Cali
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Cali (a river in Colombia)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Cali is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 20K(measured from records)
- SOSomalia≈1 in 4.9K
- SESweden1 in 58K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 314 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.9K (inferred from the name graph)
16,918 people, 2020
Highest-authority source
Somalia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Caeli in CN China.
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)
Cali (a river in Colombia)
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Cali 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 16,918 | 1 in 20K | 17K | Cali | 314 |
| CN China | ≈2,600 est. | ≈1 in 528K | — | Caeli | 5 |
| SO Somalia | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 4.9K | 168 | — | 10 |
| FR France | ≈940 est. | ≈1 in 73K | 2.3K | — | 3 |
| CO Colombia | ≈560 est. | ≈1 in 88K | — | Cali | 2 |
| SE Sweden | 177 | 1 in 58K | 177 | — | 11 |
| NO Norway | ≈71 est. | ≈1 in 77K | 18 | — | 6 |
16,918 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Puntland PEC/TPEC local-council candidate lists; 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)
Cali 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 Portuguese, Livorno, Salonika
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
In Italian, Variante di Calo
as a nameDizionario dei cognomi italiani
In nhe, alternative spelling of calli (“house”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Nickname for California: a state of the United States.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Polish, virile nominative/vocative plural of cały
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)
- Joseph Calib. 1950USAmerican actor
- Cali Timminsb. 1963CACanadian actress
- Frank Calib. 1965USAmerican mobster
- Vincent Calib. 1970FRFrench bicycle racer
- Stéphane Calib. 1972FRFrench sprinter
- Cali Sweetsb. 1988USAmerican pornographic actress
- Cali Caramelb. 1988USAmerican pornographic actor
- Cali Sheldonb. 2002USAmerican child actress
- Massimiliano CalìITItalian economist and World Bank official
- Cali Kingmusher
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 64 sources across 30 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.8K | #11,185 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.7K | #11,160 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.5K | #11,362 |
| SO Somalia | Puntland PEC/TPEC local-council candidate lists | 2023 | 168 | #3 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 48 | — |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 18 | #44,017 |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- 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
- What does the name Cali mean, and where does it come from?
- Cali (a river in Colombia) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Cali have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 17 thousand people named Cali, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cali.
- How common is the name Cali?
- In the United States, the national register counted 16,918 people named Cali in 2020, about 1 in 20 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Cali?
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/caliThe 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, “Cali”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.