Meili
given name · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Beautiful’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/mɛiʎi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Meili is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 320K(measured from records)
- TWTaiwan≈1 in 33K
- CNChina≈1 in 63K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 116 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 33K (inferred from the name graph)
≈22,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Taiwan, 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 Mei-Li in TW Taiwan.
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)
‘Beautiful’.
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Meili 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | ≈22,000 est. | ≈1 in 63K | — | Meili | 55 |
| US United States | 1,040 | 1 in 320K | 1K | Meili | 116 |
| TW Taiwan | ≈710 est. | ≈1 in 33K | — | Mei-Li | 28 |
| MY Malaysia | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 285K | — | Meili | 8 |
| FR France | ≈64 est. | ≈1 in 1.1M | — | Meili | 61 |
| HK Hong Kong | ≈49 est. | ≈1 in 147K | — | Meili | 5 |
| SG Singapore | ≈42 est. | ≈1 in 150K | — | Meili | 11 |
| EE Estonia | ≈14 est. | ≈1 in 88K | 15 | — | 2 |
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; Statistics Estonia — per-name Population Register counts (nimed). 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)
Meili 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.
In Finnish, email
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)
- Maylia Fongb. 1925USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress
- Meili Reib. 1943EEEstonian food scientist (1943-2019)
- Yu Mai-leeb. 1952CNnot in their usual nameTaiwanese gymnast
- Feng Meilib. 1961TWTaiwanese voice actors
- Meili Failleb. 1972CACanadian politician
- Kim Mi-ryeob. 1982KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress, comedian and singer
- Sarah Owenb. 1983GBnot in their usual nameBritish politician
- Xiao Meilib. 1989CNChinese women's rights activist, feminist, writer
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 45 sources across 24 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 241 | #79,075 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 234 | #76,465 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 231 | #86,747 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Meili a male or female name?
- Meili 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 Meili mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Beautiful’. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- How do you pronounce Meili?
- A machine transcription gives /mɛiʎi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Meili have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 22 thousand people named Meili in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled meili.
- How common is the name Meili?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,040 people named Meili in 2020, about 1 in 320 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Meili?
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/meiliThe 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, “Meili”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.