girls:
3.2k births since 1885
#3070 (46th percentile)
boys:
504.4k births since 1880
#63 (99th percentile)
overall:
507.6k births since 1880
#130 (98th percentile)
The name Carl is the #130 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 507,593 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #63 (98.6% percentile) for all time with 504,402 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,070 (46.3% percentile) for all time with 3,191 births since 1885.
Carl has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1885 for girls).
The name Carl has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Carl reached its peak popularity in 1915, achieving the 95.8% percentile (ranked #22) with 7,507 births per million. The name was most common in 1915, with 7,507 births per million (ranked 95.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Carl ranks #686 for boys (24.7% percentile) with 127 births per million, which is 1.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Carl reached its peak popularity in 1928, achieving the 9.3% percentile (ranked #550) with 51 births per million. The name was most common in 1895, with 57 births per million (ranked 2.8% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1994.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Carl".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Carl.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Carl", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Carl.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Carl. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Carl is pronounced as kahrl, which has 1 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 Carl? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Carl. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Carl, 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 AA1 R L) 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.
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