Pelai
surname · Latin script
Meaning: second-person plural imperative of pelar
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 1 country
Pelai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- BRBrazil1 in 3.4M(measured from records)
- THThailand≈1 in 17Mas เพไล
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 Pelai 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.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 10 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.4M (inferred from the name graph)
62 people
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Brazil
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)second-person plural imperative of pelar
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Pelai 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.
62 people counted by IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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: IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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)Pelai is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Italian, first-person singular past historic of pelare
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In French, first-person singular past historic of peler
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)- Francisco Pelayo Brizb. 1839ESnot in their usual nameSpanish writer
- Pelagi Negre i Pastellb. 1895ESnot in their usual nameSpanish historian and genealogist (1895-1984)
- Pelayo Martínez Pariciob. 1898ESnot in their usual nameSpanish architect (1898-1978)
- Pelai Sala i Berenguerb. 1909ESSpanish lawyer and politician (1909-2002)
- Pelai Vilar i Canalesb. 1909ESSpanish physician (1909-1993)
- Pelai Pagès i Blanchb. 1949ESSpanish historian
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)3 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 1 country.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 62 | #90,038 |
Reference works 2
- 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
- What does the name Pelai mean, and where does it come from?
- second-person plural imperative of pelar Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Pelai have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 62 people named Pelai, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Pelai most common?
- Pelai is densest in Brazil, where the national register counts about 1 in 3.4 million people carrying it.
- How common is the name Pelai?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 62 people named Pelai, about 1 in 3.4 million residents.
What do you want to know about Pelai?
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/pelaiThe 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, “Pelai”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.