Lí
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Hanyu Pinyin reading of 刕 (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries
Lí is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Azerbaijan it is the 2nd most common given name. Lí is also written Лейла in Cyrillic, לילי in Hebrew and ไลลา in Thai.
- CNChina≈1 in 97(inferred from the name graph)
- TWTaiwan≈1 in 260
- AZAzerbaijan≈1 in 120as Leyla
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 Lí 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #63 (measured from records)
- 9 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 670 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 97 (inferred from the name graph)
≈14,000,000 people, est.
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
China, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Lí in other scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and 6 more
(measured from records)Locally spelled Lee in US United States, GB United Kingdom, MY Malaysia, Leyla in TR Türkiye, AZ Azerbaijan, Li in CN China, TW Taiwan and Leila in GE Georgia.
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)Hanyu Pinyin reading of 刕
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 22 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Lí 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 | — | ≈14,000,000 est. | ≈1 in 97 | — | Li | 266 |
| MY Malaysia | #19 | ≈210,000 est. | ≈1 in 170 | 2.9K | Lee | 216 |
| TR Türkiye | #56 | 185,230as Leyla | 1 in 443 | 185K | Leyla | 114 |
| US United States | #31 | 164,578as Lee | 1 in 2K | 696K | Lee | 670 |
| GB United Kingdom | #38 | ≈150,000 est. | ≈1 in 464 | 2.2K | Lee | 408 |
| TW Taiwan | — | ≈90,000 est. | ≈1 in 263 | — | Li | 187 |
| AZ Azerbaijan | #2 | ≈88,000 est. | ≈1 in 116 | 2.4K | Leyla | 79 |
| GE Georgia | #41 | 16,232as ლეილა | 1 in 246 | 16K | Leila | 39 |
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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; TÜİK NIP — most used given names; ONS — Baby names England and Wales (2024); data.gov.my — Name Popularity Dashboard (JPN, by decade and ethnicity); Georgia PSDA/SDA civil-registry name statistics (per-token API); Azerbaijan Ministry of Justice — Civil Registry Name Statistics. 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)Lí is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Vietnamese, common sense
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In sga, beauty, luster, brilliance, glory
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, color, complexion
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In mtn, water
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)- Lee Kuan Yewb. 1923SG1st Prime Minister of the Republic of Singapore (1923–2015)
- Ang Leeb. 1954TWTaiwanese film director, screenwriter and producer (born 1954)
- Jet Lib. 1963CNChinese-Singaporean martial artist and actor
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)No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Lí mean, and where does it come from?
- Hanyu Pinyin reading of 刕 Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Which countries have the most people named Lí?
- Mondonomo estimates about 14 million people named Lí in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled li. After it come Malaysia, Türkiye, United States and United Kingdom; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Lí?
- In Türkiye, the national register counted 185,230 people named Leyla in 2025, about 1 in 443 residents.
- How common is Lí compared with other names?
- In Azerbaijan, Lí is the 2nd most common given name of 28,848 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Lí?
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/l%C3%ADThe 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, “Lí” — the 2nd most common given name in Azerbaijan. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.