Li
Given to women and men in near-equal measure, which few names manage: of the roughly 160 people who carry it in Poland, a little over a third are men. A Chinese name meaning brightness or light, said LEE.
Li Pronunciation
Li is pronounced LEE (/li/).
What Li means
Where Li comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Li comes into Polish from Chinese, a language family with no relation to the Slavic and Latin roots behind most names on a school register. In Mandarin, one common written form is the character 丽 (lì), which means beautiful. The Polish gloss keeps two senses at once: piękno, beauty, and jasność, brightness.
The name has no diminutive and no variant here. It stays a single syllable. That brevity marks it out on an official form at the urząd, where surnames often run the length of a whole line and given names arrive with heavy Slavic endings.
Because the sound comes without that grammar attached, Li reads the same for a girl or a boy, and it barely bends through the Polish cases. The sense of "beautiful" was not fixed to Li by any later legend. It sits inside the character 丽 itself.
How many people are named Li
1 in 218872 women in Poland is named Li. 159 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2560 among female names.
Li as a middle name
Li is a first name for 159 women in Poland and a middle name for another 30, an 84/16 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1287th, between Janka (30) and Margaretta (30).