Kohli
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a pet form of an old personal name formed with the element Colo- (cognate with Old Norse kollir ‘helmet’)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Kohli is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 101K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 19Kas Corley
- CHSwitzerland1 in 7.8K
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 Kohli 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 266 (measured from records)
- 1 in 7.8K (inferred from the name graph)
17,931 named Corley, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Koli in IN India, FI Finland, ID Indonesia and Köhli in UY Uruguay.
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)
from a pet form of an old personal name formed with the element Colo- (cognate with Old Norse kollir ‘helmet’).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kohli 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 | — | 17,931as Corley | 1 in 19K | 18K | Kohli | 266 |
| IN India | #269 | 13,189 | 1 in 101K | 13K | Koli | 233 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 113K | — | Kohli | 17 |
| BR Brazil | — | 1,981as Coli | 1 in 107K | 2K | Kohli | 9 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 158K | — | Koli | 52 |
| FI Finland | — | 1,528as Koli | 1 in 3.6K | 1.5K | Koli | 11 |
| CH Switzerland | #414 | 1,075 | 1 in 7.8K | 1.1K | Kohli | 50 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 323as Coli | 1 in 10K | 323 | Köhli | 4 |
| AL Albania | — | ≈250 est. | ≈1 in 12K | 154 | — | — |
17,931 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling corley. 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts). 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)
Kohli 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.
Hindu (Khatri) and Sikh name of unknown etymology. It is based on the name of a clan in the Khatri community.
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)
- F. C. Kohlib. 1924INIndian businessman (1924-2020)
- Om Prakash Kohlib. 1935INIndian politician
- Dev Kohlib. 1942INIndian Hindustani poet and lyricist
- Hardeep Singh Kohlib. 1969GBScottish broadcaster
- Krishna Kumari Kolhib. 1979PKnot in their usual namePakistani politician
- Rahul Kohlib. 1985GBBritish actor
- Virat Kohlib. 1988INIndian cricket player
- Kunal Kohlib. 2000INIndian film director
- Palak Kohlib. 2002INIndian para-badminton player
- Neelu KohliINIndian model and television 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 31 sources across 19 countries.
Reference works 5
- 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
- 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
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 Kohli mean, and where does it come from?
- from a pet form of an old personal name formed with the element Colo- (cognate with Old Norse kollir ‘helmet’). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Kohli have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 18 thousand people named Corley, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Kohli most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kohli is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 7.8 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kohli?
- In India, the national register counted 13,189 people named Kohli, about 1 in 101 thousand residents.
- How common is Kohli compared with other names?
- In India, Kohli is the 269th most common surname of 1,492,515 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kohli?
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/kohliThe 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, “Kohli” — the 269th most common surname in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.