Kelsey
given name · Latin script
Meaning: ‘person from Kelsey’, Lincolnshire, from Cenel’s low-lying land
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kɛlsi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kelsey is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 2.4K(measured from records)
- CACanada≈1 in 6K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 7.2K
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)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 549 (measured from records)
- 1 in 2.4K (inferred from the name graph)
138,745 people, 2020
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
‘person from Kelsey’, Lincolnshire, from Cenel’s low-lying land.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Kelsey, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kelsey 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 | #603 | 138,745 | 1 in 2.4K | 135K | Kelsey | 549 |
| CA Canada | #626 | ≈6,200 est. | ≈1 in 6K | 3 | Kelsey | 250 |
| GB United Kingdom | #927 | ≈5,100 est. | ≈1 in 13K | 4 | Kelsey | 223 |
| AU Australia | #767 | ≈3,500 est. | ≈1 in 7.2K | 65 | Kelsey | 183 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈890 est. | ≈1 in 64K | — | Kelsey | 58 |
| NZ New Zealand | #608 | ≈380 est. | ≈1 in 13K | 15 | Kelsey | 103 |
138,745 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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; QLD BDM — Top 100 Baby Names Queensland (1960–present); DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). 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)
Kelsey 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 English, from North or South Kelsey (Lincolnshire); first attested Richard de Kelleseia 1179–84 RegAntiquiss
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, habitational name from North or South Kelsey in Lincolnshire, so named from Ceol, an Old English personal name, or alternatively from an unattested Old Scandinavian word, keel ‘wedge-shaped piece of land’, + eg ‘island’, ‘area of dry land in a marsh’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
,2 Transferred use of the surname, which is from an Old English masculine personal name Céolsige, derived from céol ‘ship’ + sige ‘victory’. Its use as a girl’s name may have been influenced by names such as Elsie. Variant: Kelsie.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, called from the gen. case of the OE personal name *Cenel (a deriv. of cpd names with the first element cene fierce, brave; cf. Keen) + OE eg island, low-lying land.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Possibly also an Americanized form of German Gelzer. [HUliSES William Kelsey was one of the founders of Hartford, CT, (coming from Cambridge, MA, with Thomas Hooker) in 1635.
as a nameDictionary of American Family 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)
- Kelsey Grammerb. 1955USAmerican actor
- Kelsey Mannb. 1974USAmerican film director
- Kelsey Serwab. 1989CACanadian freestyle skier
- Kelsey Sandersb. 1990USAmerican actress and singer
- Kelsey-Lee Robertsb. 1991AUAustralian javelin thrower (1991-)
- Kelsey Chowb. 1991USAmerican actress
- Kelsey Robinsonb. 1992USAmerican volleyball player and beach volleyball player
- Kelsey Plumb. 1994USAmerican basketball player (born 1994)
- Kelsey Mitchellb. 1995USAmerican basketball player (born 1995)
- Kelsey Smith-Briggsb. 2002USchild murdered 2005 in Oklahoma, United States
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)
Attested in 67 sources across 32 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 14K | #2,501 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 14K | #2,397 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 14K | #2,603 |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname 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
- Is Kelsey a male or female name?
- Kelsey 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.
- What does the name Kelsey mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘person from Kelsey’, Lincolnshire, from Cenel’s low-lying land. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Kelsey?
- In the etymology graph, Kelsie, Kelsi and Kelsea are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Kelsey?
- A machine transcription gives /kɛlsi/ (IPA) for English.
- How common is the name Kelsey?
- In the United States, the national register counted 138,745 people named Kelsey in 2020, about 1 in 2.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Kelsey compared with other names?
- In the United States, Kelsey is the 603rd most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
- In which country does Kelsey have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 139 thousand people named Kelsey, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kelsey.
- Where is Kelsey most common?
- Kelsey is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 2.4 thousand people carrying it.
What do you want to know about Kelsey?
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/kelseyThe 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, “Kelsey” — the 603rd most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.