Kali means ‘the black one’ in Sanskrit. The Hindu goddess Kali is fierce and destructive. She is usually depicted with black skin and four arms, holding a severed head and brandishing a sword.
Kali is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Kali isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Kali ranks 268. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 7 were named Kali. In the entire USA, approximately 27,335 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Kali. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Kali means ‘the black one’ in Sanskrit. The Hindu goddess Kali is fierce and destructive. She is usually depicted with black skin and four arms, holding a severed head and brandishing a sword.
Sanskrit is the sacred ... language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It arose in South Asia.
Kali is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Kali cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #219 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2019. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Kali, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their daughter. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Kali seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kali was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
1,249 babies were named Kali in 2022 - that's 1 in 121,502 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Kali ranked 229 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
The name Kali may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Kali is apparently especially popular in Nevada. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 2,190 women in Nevada is called Kali. In total, that’s 204 women who feel addressed when the name Kali is shouted loudly across Nevada and who ensure that their name makes it to #473 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Kali as the answer a total of 27,267 times. This places Kali at #739 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Kali as a baby name is, of course, a bit different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter K is a real popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 7.5% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A, S and M are more common for girls' names.
With four letters, the name Kali is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that if 7.5% of all girls' names start with a K, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the girls' names that begin with a K, Karen is the most common.
If your name is Kali and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Kali, you can simply say:
Koala
Apple
Lion
Igloo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kali
Kali
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
A
L
I
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
K
A
L
I
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Kali sounds like this:
