Calliope
2025 SSA
About Calliope
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.
Pronounced kuh-LY-uh-pee.
As of October 2026, Calliope ranked #451 in US births in 2025 SSA, Nameberry popularity #256.
Popularity & trends
Data table
| Year | US rank | Births | Per million |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | #1,228 | 199 | 111.4 |
| 2015 | #1,149 | 221 | 123.8 |
| 2016 | #941 | 291 | 164.2 |
| 2017 | #814 | 335 | 194 |
| 2018 | #806 | 337 | 198.1 |
| 2019 | #706 | 407 | 242.5 |
| 2020 | #692 | 409 | 253 |
| 2021 | #600 | 497 | 302.9 |
| 2022 | #588 | 510 | 311 |
| 2023 | #491 | 622 | 387.6 |
| 2024 | #499 | 613 | 378.4 |
| 2025 | #451 | 682 | 424.3 |
World rankings
Similar names
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Calliope on lists
Famous Calliopes
- 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
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