Meiling
given name · English · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Meiling is a given name, most frequently recorded in Malaysia, where it is the 68th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Chinese, written in the Latin script.
- HKHong Kong1 in 326◐
- MYMalaysia1 in 1.5K
- SGSingapore1 in 2K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈52K ●
- 3 ●
- Sources
- 295 ●
- 1 in 665 ◐
across 11 countries
recorded for this name
358K records
Official registry-verified
Norway
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Mei in US United States, MY Malaysia, AU Australia and 17 more, May in PL Poland, CH Switzerland, Мей in RU Russia, UA Ukraine and Mae in CZ Czechia.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ 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 across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MY Malaysia | #68 | 43,328 | 45K rec. | — | 1.5K | Mei | 100 |
| US United States | — | 24,907 | 211K rec. | 1 in 13K | 103K | Mei | 295 |
| AU Australia | #725 | 15,963 | 17K rec. | — | 6 | Mei | 136 |
| FR France | — | 11,600△ | 4.1K rec. | 1 in 5.8K | 12K | Mei | 165 |
| HK Hong Kong | #14 | 11,416 | 8.1K rec. | — | — | Mei | 93 |
| TW Taiwan | #931 | 10,531 | 6.1K rec. | — | — | Mei | 128 |
| CN China | — | 9,497 | 4.7K rec. | — | — | Mei | 124 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 9,280 | 9.4K rec. | — | 6 | Mei | 110 |
| NO Norway | — | 8,217△ | 76 rec. | 1 in 665 | 18K | — | 13 |
| PH Philippines | — | 7,827 | 3.3K rec. | — | — | Mei | 57 |
| CA Canada | — | 5,641 | 6.6K rec. | — | 8 | Mei | 97 |
| SG Singapore | #133 | 5,291 | 6.1K rec. | — | — | Mei | 101 |
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- English7.7K39%
- Chinese5.2K26%
- Spanish2.3K11%
- 1.6K8%
- French3142%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| English | 7,711 | 39% |
| Chinese | 5,226 | 26% |
| Spanish | 2,283 | 11% |
| 1,601 | 8% | |
| French | 314 | 2% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Over time●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 1960 | 6 |
| 1966 | 5 |
| 1974 | 5 |
| 1975 | 6 |
| 1976 | 8 |
| 1977 | 6 |
| 1979 | 9 |
| 1980 | 7 |
| 1981 | 9 |
| 1982 | 6 |
| 1983 | 11 |
| 1984 | 10 |
| 1985 | 5 |
| 1986 | 6 |
| 1987 | 5 |
| 1988 | 6 |
| 1990 | 11 |
| 1992 | 9 |
| 1996 | 5 |
| 1999 | 11 |
| 2000 | 6 |
| 2001 | 12 |
| 2002 | 15 |
| 2003 | 6 |
| 2004 | 10 |
| 2005 | 17 |
| 2006 | 7 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2008 | 13 |
| 2009 | 15 |
| 2010 | 8 |
| 2011 | 5 |
| 2012 | 11 |
| 2013 | 10 |
| 2014 | 10 |
| 2015 | 13 |
| 2016 | 5 |
| 2017 | 6 |
| 2018 | 9 |
| 2019 | 5 |
| 2020 | 6 |
| 2022 | 5 |
| 2023 | 6 |
| 2024 | 7 |
| 2025 | 5 |
US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 45 years between 1960–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Soong May-lingb. 1898USnot in their usual nameChiang Kai-shek's wife, First Lady of the Republic of China (1898–2003)
- Jo Mi-ryeongb. 1929KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actress born 1929
- Birei Kinb. 1934JPnot in their usual nameTaiwan-born Japanese critic and political activist
- Marilyn Chinb. 1955USnot in their usual nameAmerican writer
- Barbara Yungb. 1959CNnot in their usual nameHong Kong actress (1959–1985)
- Yu Meilingb. 1967CNChinese Go player
- Zero Choub. 1969TWnot in their usual nameTaiwanese film director
- Tracy Leeb. 1985MYnot in their usual nameMalaysian actress and television host
- Melek Hub. 1989TRnot in their usual nameTurkish table tennis player (born 1989)
- Wang Meilingb. 2000CNChinese tennis player
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●
Attested in 34 sources across 20 countries.
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name 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 2026-09-12 data build · 233 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Meiling?
- We estimate roughly 52 thousand people bear Meiling (counting its spellings and scripts) across 11 countries in our records.
- In which country does Meiling have the most bearers?
- Meiling is most frequently recorded in Malaysia, where it is most often spelled mei.
- How common is Meiling compared with other names?
- In Malaysia, Meiling is the 68th most common given name of 325,158 given names recorded there.
- Is Meiling a male or female name?
- Meiling is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/meilingThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.
About this data
Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.
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, “Meiling” — the 68th most common given name in Malaysia. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.