Jelani
given name · Latin script
Meaning: name; often interpreted as "mighty" in Swahili usage (Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…)
A male name· listed as male by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 24 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Jelani is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 3,900 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2020.
- KNSt. Kitts & Nevis≈1 in 7.1K(inferred from the name graph)
- GYGuyana1 in 63K
- USUnited States1 in 85K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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
- 294 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 7.1K (inferred from the name graph)
3,900 people, 2020
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
St. Kitts & Nevis, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)name; often interpreted as "mighty" in Swahili usage
Cited for this meaning 1
- Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Where in the world
(measured from records)Jelani 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 | — | 3,900 | 1 in 85K | 3.5K | Jelani | 294 |
| IN India | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 1.3M | 21 | Jelani | 17 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈950 est. | ≈1 in 245K | — | Jelani | 21 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 163K | — | Jelani | 26 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 178 | 1 in 97K | 159 | Jelani | 12 |
| GY Guyana | — | 12 | 1 in 63K | 12 | — | 1 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | — | ≈7 est. | ≈1 in 7.1K | 13 | — | 3 |
| MM Myanmar (Burma) | #373 | — | — | — | Jelani | 1 |
3,900 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; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); the in-instate-surnames-bystate register; St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)Jelani 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.
great
as a nameWhats in a name = Unaitwaje a Swahili book of names
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)- Jelani Nelsonb. 1984USAmerican computer scientist
- Jelani Alladinb. 1992USAmerican actor
- Jelani Reshaun Sumiyoshib. 1997JPJapanese association football player
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)39 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 24 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Jelani mean, and where does it come from?
- name; often interpreted as "mighty" in Swahili usage Recorded by Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular….
- Which countries have the most people named Jelani?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.9 thousand people named Jelani, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled jelani. After it come India, Nigeria, Malaysia and Netherlands; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Is Jelani a male or female name?
- Jelani is a male name. National registers that list it by sex list it as male: United States (Census Bureau, 2020), France (INSEE, 2024) and Netherlands (Meertens NVB).
- How common is the name Jelani?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,900 people named Jelani in 2020, about 1 in 85 thousand residents.
- How common is Jelani compared with other names?
- In Myanmar (Burma), Jelani is the 373rd most common given name of 9,528 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Jelani?
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/jelaniThe 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, “Jelani” — ranked 4678th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2020). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.