girls:
12.7k births since 1880
#1385 (76th percentile)
boys:
16.8k births since 1880
#885 (81st percentile)
overall:
29.6k births since 1880
#1483 (81st percentile)
The name Carey is the #1,483 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 29,581 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 80.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 80.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #885 (80.7% percentile) for all time with 16,845 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,385 (75.8% percentile) for all time with 12,736 births since 1880.
Carey has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Carey has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (56.9% of all recorded births). In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Carey were boys.
For boys, Carey reached its peak popularity in 1957, achieving the 49.0% percentile (ranked #336) with 211 births per million. The name was most common in 1957, with 211 births per million (ranked 49.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1975, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Carey ranks #905 for boys (0.7% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 2.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Carey reached its peak popularity in 1975, achieving the 61.4% percentile (ranked #291) with 484 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 484 births per million (ranked 61.4% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Carey".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Carrie. View all variations of Carrie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Carey", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 44 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Carrie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Carrie..
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Carey. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 73.7% confident that Carey is pronounced as KEH-ree, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KAH-ree, at 12.3% confidence, with 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Carey? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Carey. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Carey, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like K EH1 R IY0) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker