Cai

At the 2020 census, 13,276 Americans bore the surname Cai — 2,651st out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 22,500.

By the numbers

People: 13,276
Rank: 2,651st
How common: 1 in 22,500
Per 100,000: 4.4

Where the name comes from

Origin Chinese

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Cai described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 95.9%
White, not Hispanic 2.6%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 0.7%
Black, not Hispanic 0.5%
Hispanic or Latino 0.3%

1 category is not listed because nobody with this surname reported that background.

Notable people called Cai

Cai Lun (50–121)Chinese official credited with inventing paper
Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940)Chinese educator, Esperantist and the president of Peking University
Cai Yan (177–249)3rd century Chinese poet and musician
Cai Yong (133–192)Chinese official and scholar
Cai Yun (born 1980)Chinese badminton player
Cai Qi (born 1955)First Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party
Cai Xiang (1012–1067)Chinese calligrapher-architect
Cai Zelin (born 1991)Chinese racewalker

People named Cai with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Surnames like Cai

Also a first name

Cai has been given to 1,945 American babies as a first name since 1989, peaking in 2022. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.