Ka-Wai
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Meaning
guardian of the family (家衛); famously borne by Wong Kar-wai, auteur director of In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express
The story
Ka-Wai reads in this collection as guardian of the family, 家衛, and one widely celebrated bearer guards moving images instead. Wong Kar-wai, born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong from childhood, is an auteur of Hong Kong cinema; in 1997 he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for Happy Together, Hong Kong's first winner of that award. In the Mood for Love, from 2000, is revered for its lush visuals and subtle storytelling, and voters for the British Film Institute have named him the third-greatest director of the previous quarter-century. In American birth records Ka-Wai is absent, the usual story for romanized Cantonese given names. On a cinema marquee, the romanization Kar-wai is its own kind of signature.
How popular is Ka-Wai around the world?
Ka-Wai does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
United States
under 5 a year
Ka-Wai does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
Births with a Social Security record. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration
Not on the record in Spain, Mexico City, Argentina, Puerto Rico, England and Wales, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Poland: those registries withhold small counts, so rare uses may sit below their floors.
Not on the Chile record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 5 registrations in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the Montevideo record for 1940 to 2011: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the France record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 20 births in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the South Australia record for 1944 to 2017: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the Austria record for 1984 to 2025: Statistik Austria publishes every first name down to a single birth, so this name was not given there in those years (before 2010 the record covers babies with Austrian citizenship only). Not on Norway’s list: Statistics Norway lists only first names carried by 200 or more living people, so rarer names are not shown.
Keep exploring
The Ka-Wai deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Ka-Wai truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Ka-Wai fits with your family’s names and surname.
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