Cái
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Indicates an inanimate, tangible thing (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 1 country
Cái is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 8,457 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- FIFinland1 in 27K(measured from records)
- ESSpain1 in 34K
- USUnited States1 in 39K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 46 (measured from records)
- 1 in 27K (inferred from the name graph)
8,457 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Cai in US United States, MO Macao.
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)Indicates an inanimate, tangible thing
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Cái is found
(measured from records)Cái 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.
8,457 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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)Cái is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In tyz, to place something to cross over a vertical or horizontal gap
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin reading of 纔 /才
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)- Gai Ruyinb. 1953CNnot in their usual nameChinese politician
- Gai Wenqib. 1973CNnot in their usual nameChinese politician
- Cai KuanMing dynasty person CBDB = 126370
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)No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Cái mean, and where does it come from?
- Indicates an inanimate, tangible thing Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Cái?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 8.5 thousand people named Cái, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cai. After it come Spain, Argentina, Finland and Poland; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Cái most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Cái is densest in Finland — about 1 in 27 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Cái?
- In the United States, the national register counted 8,457 people named Cái in 2010, about 1 in 39 thousand residents.
- How common is Cái compared with other names?
- In Macao, Cái is the 161st most common surname of 436 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Cái?
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/c%C3%A1iThe 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, “Cái” — ranked 2651st in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.