Mei

At the 2020 census, 9,725 Americans bore the surname Mei — 3,578th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 30,700.

By the numbers

People: 9,725
Rank: 3,578th
How common: 1 in 30,700
Per 100,000: 3.3

Where the name comes from

Origin Mandarin

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

Who bears the name

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

Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 93.5%
White, not Hispanic 4.7%
Hispanic or Latino 0.8%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 0.7%
Black, not Hispanic 0.3%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 0.04%

Notable people called Mei

Yuan Mei (1716–1797)poet, essayist, scholar of the Qing Dynasty
Mei Lanfang (1894–1961)Peking opera artist
Lev Mei (1822–1862)Russian writer
Mei Fang (born 1989)Chinese Professional Footballer
Mei Yaochen (1002–1060)poet
Stefano Mei (born 1963)Italian athletics competitor
Girolamo Mei (1519–1594)Italian historian

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

Surnames like Mei

Also a first name

Mei has been given to 1,859 American babies as a first name since 1947, peaking in 2025. 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.