Nagai
surname · Latin script
Meaning: written in either of two ways, both with characters meaning ‘long’ and ‘well’ (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 15 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/nɐɡaj/(machine-generated) Portuguese · model-generated
Nagai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 761 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- FIFinland1 in 214K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 437K
- BEBelgium1 in 1.3M
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
- 70 (measured from records)
- 1 in 214K (inferred from the name graph)
761 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Nagai
- Portuguese:/nɐɡaj/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)written in either of two ways, both with characters meaning ‘long’ and ‘well’. Bearers of either version of the name appear to be descended from either the Saito or Miura famihes. This name is now also established in Hawaii.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Nagai is found
(measured from records)Nagai 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.
761 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; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population 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)Nagai 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 Russian, "in a grove."
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
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)- Kafū Nagaib. 1879JPJapanese writer (1879−1959)
- Frank Nagaib. 1932JPJapanese singer (1932-2008)
- Gō Nagaib. 1945JPJapanese manga artist and prolific author of science fiction, fantasy, horror and erotica
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)Evidence
(measured from records)29 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 15 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Nagai come from?
- written in either of two ways, both with characters meaning ‘long’ and ‘well’. Bearers of either version of the name appear to be descended from either the Saito or Miura famihes. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Nagai?
- In Portuguese /nɐɡaj/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- What does the name Nagai mean?
- Recorded meaning: written in either of two ways, both with characters meaning ‘long’ and ‘well’.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Nagai?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 761 people named Nagai, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nagai. After it come Finland, Spain, India and Argentina; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Nagai most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Nagai is densest in Finland — about 1 in 214 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Nagai?
- In the United States, the national register counted 761 people named Nagai in 2010, about 1 in 437 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Nagai?
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/nagaiThe 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, “Nagai” — ranked 28790th in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.