Meaning and history
Jelani began appearing rarely as a given name in the United States in 1973 after being mentioned in a nationwide newspaper article about African baby names. It is probably derived from the Arabic name Jilani, used in honor of the Sufi scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, and the newspaper’s gloss of “mighty” matches the meaning of Qadir. The name reached its highest popularity in 1998, likely because it shared sounds with other fashionable African-American names of that period.
20062006: 13 births, rank #8,715
2007: 13 births, rank #9,007
2008: 13 births, rank #8,965
2009: 14 births, rank #8,454
2010: 9 births, rank #11,246
20112011: 13 births, rank #8,614
2012: 13 births, rank #8,632
2013: 10 births, rank #10,235
2014: 10 births, rank #10,129
2015: 16 births, rank #7,266
20162016: 23 births, rank #5,622
2017: 34 births, rank #4,220
2018: 30 births, rank #4,562
2019: 40 births, rank #3,718
2020: 41 births, rank #3,607
20212021: 52 births, rank #3,112
2022: 84 births, rank #2,228
2023: 87 births, rank #2,176
2024: 88 births, rank #2,150
20252025: 67 births, rank #2,583
In 2025, 67 babies were recorded with the name Jelani, ranking #2,583 among girls.