Cai
Cai is a boy's name that peaked in 2022, when it was the 1,611th most popular in the United States. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 2,108th. About 1,900 Cais are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 9.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Cai boys named Cai
Girls and boys called Cai
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Both, throughout, without either side ever taking it over: 495 girls and 1,450 boys in all, and in 2025 the split was 12 to 69.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 24 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 1,945
- Estimated living today
- 1,900
- Median age today
- 9
- Peak year
- 2022
- Best rank
- 1,611th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,108th
- First recorded
- 1989
- Girls / boys
- 495 / 1,450
How old the living Cais are
born that year still alive today
Of the 1,945 babies given the name since 1989, about 1,900 are alive — 99 in every hundred. Roughly 1,600 of them are children and 0 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2016 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Notable Cais
- Cai Lun (50–121)Chinese official credited with inventing paper
- Cai Yan (177–249)3rd century Chinese poet and musician
- Cai Yun (born 1980)Chinese badminton player
- Cai Qi (born 1955)First Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party
- Cai Chang (1900–1990)Chinese politician
- Cai Guo-Qiang (born 1957)Chinese installation artist
- Cai Wu (born 1949)Chinese politician
- Cai Zhenhua (born 1961)male former table tennis player from China
People named Cai with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Cai is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Cai is most concentrated in Florida (6.0×), Georgia (3.4×), Texas (3.3×), California (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2022
The most popular boys’ names the year Cai peaked:
Cai elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Cai | 2,740 | 214th |
| Scotland boys | Cai | 75 | 470th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Cai | 23 | 272nd |
| Ireland boys | Cai | 18 | 604th |
| England and Wales girls | Cai | 17 | 3,382nd |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Cai among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Cai | 20 | 26 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Related names
Cai against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.