🔥Calliope

ka-LYE-o-pee; ka-lee-O-pee; kah-LYO-pee

Greek mythology

"beautiful voice"

Calliope Origin and Meaning

The name Calliope is a girl's name of Greek origin meaning "beautiful voice".

Melodic and beautiful but with a touch of sass, Calliope is the name of the muse of epic poetry — and perhaps less glamorously, the musical instrument on the merry-go-round. Bold and creative, it debuted in the US Top 1000 in 2016, and in more recent year, IT appeared in the Top 500.

Also spelled as Kalliope — the more traditional Greek transliteration — Calliope means "beautiful voice", making this a musical and poetic choice. It was rarely heard in the US until the 2000s when Calliope "Callie" Torres from the show Grey's Anatomy helped introduce it to a wider audience.

Now, given to around 600 girls in a recent year, Calliope has likely been helped up the charts by its similarity to the popular Penelope and by its usable nicknames: Callie, Clio, and Lola.

While Americans usually pronounce this name with a long EYE sound and the emphasis on the second syllable, in Greek it would typically be pronounced kah-LYO-pee. There's also the ka-lee-O-pee pronunciation, heard in the UK.

Calliope Rank in US Top 1000

# 499 in the US

Calliope Rank in Nameberry Top 1000

# 273 on Nameberry

Popularity of the name Calliope

• 499 US 2024
• 273 Nameberry 2025
• 380 Future 2028
• 904 England 2024

20 Names Similar to Calliope

These 20 names were selected by our users that were looking for other names like Calliope.

• Seraphina
• Persephone
• Ariadne
• Cassiopeia
• Artemis
• Andromeda
• Lilith
• Althea
• Cressida
• Isadora
• Circe
• Guinevere
• Cassia
• Astrid
• Selene
• Astra
• Amaryllis
• Octavia
• Lyra
• Gaia

Famous People Named Calliope

• Saint Calliope aka Kalliopi 3rd century Roman martyr
• Calliope "Callie" Thorne American actress
• Calliope Tsoupaki Greek pianist and composer
• Calliope "Popi" Maliotaki Greek folk,pop singer
• Calliope Maeve Day (b. 2017) daughter of Felicia Day

The name Calliope in Pop Culture

• Dr. Calliope Iphigenia "Callie" Torres character on TV's Grey's Anatomy
• Calliope/Callie/Cal Stephanides narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex
• Calliope character in "Scrambled Eggs at Midnight" by Brad Barkley and Heather Hepler
• Calliope main character in Aimee Carter's "Goddess Test"
• Calliope "Callie " character in the webcomic Homestuck
• Calliope character in the Burn Journals by Brad Runyon
• Calliope Jones character on TV's "Days of our Lives"
• Calliope Bell character in Stephanie Perkins "Lola and the Boy Next Door"
• Calliope one of the ugly stepsisters in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella
• Calliope character in "Coyote Blue" by Christopher Moore
• Calliope "Callie" main character in "Oblivion" by Sasha Dawn, who suffers from graphomania, an irresistible urge to write
• Calliope character on TV's "One Tree Hill"
• The Calliope housing project in New Orleans, Louisiana
• Calliope Chadwick character in Mother,Daughter Book Club series by Heather Vogel Frederick
• Calliope Juniper a character from The Simpsons