Cai
surname · Latin script
Meaning: nonstandard spelling of cāi
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Cai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 39K(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 27K
- ESSpain1 in 34K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 337 (measured from records)
- 1 in 27K (inferred from the name graph)
8,457 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
nonstandard spelling of cāi
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Cai 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.
8,457 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; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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)
Cai is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Italian, initialism of Club Alpino Italiano (“Italian alpine club”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
ISO 639-2 & ISO 639-5 language code for Central American Indian languages.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In tyz, veranda opposite the entrance in Tày-styled stilt houses
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In fj, have sexual intercourse with: trans. _cai-tá_
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
In Sundanese, liquid, sap, juice; wet; water; river
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
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)
- Cai Lunb. 48CNChinese official credited with inventing paper (died 121)
- Qi Baishib. 1864CNnot in their usual nameChinese painter (1864-1957)
- Cai Yuanpeib. 1868CNChinese educator, Esperantist and the president of Peking University (1868-1940)
- Cai Qib. 1955CNFirst Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party
- Tsai Ing-wenb. 1956TWnot in their usual name14th and 15th President of Republic of China (Taiwan)
- Tsai Ming-liangb. 1957MYnot in their usual nameMalaysian-Taiwanese filmmaker (born 1957)
- Amy Chuab. 1962USnot in their usual nameAmerican law professor and writer (born 1962)
- Jolin Tsaib. 1980TWnot in their usual nameTaiwanese singer, songwriter, and actress (born 1980)
- Lauren Tsaib. 1998USnot in their usual nameChinese–American model and illustrator
- Albert Tsaib. 2004USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor (born 2004)
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 60 sources across 28 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 1.2K | #6,791 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 1.1K | #6,791 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 144 | #11,758 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 120 | #6,322 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 76 | #1,764 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 69 | — |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 68 | #4,047 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 60 | #4,463 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 46 | #12,415 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present) | 2024 | 33 | #1,260 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register) | — | 26 | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 20 | #27,268 |
Reference works 5
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Cai mean, and where does it come from?
- nonstandard spelling of cāi Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How common is the name Cai?
- In the United States, the national register counted 8,457 people named Cai in 2010, about 1 in 39 thousand residents.
- How common is Cai compared with other names?
- In Singapore, Cai is the 523rd most common surname of 78,292 surnames recorded there.
- What are other forms of the name Cai?
- In the etymology graph, Kolos, Klaes and Miksa are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Cai have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 8.5 thousand people named Cai, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cai.
- Where is Cai most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Cai is densest in Finland — about 1 in 27 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
What do you want to know about Cai?
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/caiThe 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, “Cai” — the 523rd most common surname in Singapore. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.