Mei
Mei reached its high-water mark in 2025 at number 1,733, and has been recorded 1,859 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,733rd. About 1,800 Meis are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 14.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Mei
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 1,859
- Estimated living today
- 1,800
- Median age today
- 14
- Peak year
- 2025
- Best rank
- 1,733rd
- Rank in 2025
- 1,733rd
- First recorded
- 1947
How old the living Meis are
born that year still alive today
Of the 1,859 babies given the name since 1947, about 1,800 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 1,000 of them are children and 30 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2011 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.
Where the name comes from
Origin Mandarin
From cmn 美 (“beautiful”), a common Chinese given name among women.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Meis
- Mei Finegold (born 1982)Israeli singer
- Mei Nagano (born 1999)Japanese actress
- Jessie Mei Li (born 1995)English actress
- Mei Yamazaki (born 2005)Japanese singer, dancer and model
People named Mei with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Mei is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Mei is most concentrated in California (5.0×), New York (3.7×), Washington (2.1×), Texas (1.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2025
The most popular girls’ names the year Mei peaked:
Mei elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Meï +1 spelling | 1,015 | 611th |
| England and Wales girls | Mei | 366 | 1,218th |
| Switzerland girls | Mei | 68 | 922nd |
| Scotland girls | Mei | 4 | 448th |
| England and Wales boys | Mei | 3 | 4,789th |
| Ireland girls | Mei | 3 | 871st |
| Poland girls | Mei | 2 birth registrations | 729th |
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.
Mei: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Mei | 38 | 0.003% | 730th |
| French girls | Switzerland | Mei | 21 | 0.005% | 512th |
| Italian girls | Switzerland | Mei | 8 | 0.012% | 87th |
| Romansh girls | Switzerland | Mei | 1 | 0.027% | 10th |
Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.
Mei 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 girls | Mei | 120 | 267 |
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.
Where Mei lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 578 women called Mei were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Girona | Mei | 34 | 0.082 | 935 |
| Barcelona | Mei | 223 | 0.073 | 912 |
| Lleida | Mei | 11 | 0.049 | 1,251 |
| Tarragona | Mei | 19 | 0.043 | 1,433 |
| Balears, Illes | Mei | 21 | 0.033 | 1,719 |
| Gipuzkoa | Mei | 12 | 0.032 | 1,585 |
Listed in 19 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 33 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Mei 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.