Pilai
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Pilai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 29Kas Pillai(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 101Kas Pillai
- GDGrenada1 in 113Kas Pillai
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Pilai 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.
- India (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 42 (measured from records)
- 1 in 29K (inferred from the name graph)
45,738 named Pillai
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
India, as Pillai
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Pillai in IN India, US United States.
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Pilai 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | 45,738as Pillai | 1 in 29K | 46K | Pillai | 42 |
| US United States | 1,944as Pillai | 1 in 171K | 3.2K | Pillai | 27 |
| BR Brazil | 102as Pillat | 1 in 2.1M | 102 | — | — |
| FI Finland | 55as Pillai | 1 in 101K | 55 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 51as Pillai | 1 in 200K | 51 | — | — |
| NO Norway | 42as Pillai | 1 in 130K | 42 | — | — |
| GD Grenada | 1as Pillai | 1 in 113K | 1 | — | — |
45,738 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. 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)
Pilai is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In French, first-person singular past historic of piler
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Portuguese, second-person plural imperative of pilar
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In tpi, to play
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 4 sources across 1 country.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 203 | #17,532 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 144 | #17,729 |
Reference works 1
- 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
- In which country does Pilai have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 46 thousand people named Pillai, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Pilai most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Pilai itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is India's: the national register counts about 1 in 29 thousand people named Pillai.
- How common is the name Pilai?
- In India, the national register counted 45,738 people named Pillai, about 1 in 29 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Pilai?
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/pilaiThe 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, “Pilai”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.