girls:
141.2k births since 1881
#281 (95th percentile)
boys:
16.8k births since 1894
#888 (81st percentile)
overall:
158k births since 1881
#478 (94th percentile)
The name Carmen is the #478 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 157,995 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 93.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 93.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #281 (95.1% percentile) for all time with 141,221 births since 1881. For boys, it ranks #888 (80.6% percentile) for all time with 16,774 births since 1894.
Carmen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (1881 for girls and 1894 for boys).
The name Carmen has been given predominantly to girls, with 89.4% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 93.3% of babies named Carmen were girls.
For girls, Carmen reached its peak popularity in 1968, achieving the 81.2% percentile (ranked #141) with 1,327 births per million. The name was most common in 1968, with 1,327 births per million (ranked 81.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2007, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Carmen ranks #397 for girls (58.1% percentile) with 405 births per million, which is 30.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Carmen reached its peak popularity in 1924, achieving the 47.2% percentile (ranked #293) with 294 births per million. The name was most common in 1916, with 299 births per million (ranked 44.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Carmen ranks #865 for boys (5.1% percentile) with 28 births per million, which is 9.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Carmen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Carmen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Carmen", 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 Carmen.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Carmen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 77.1% confident that Carmen is pronounced as KAHR-muhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KAHR-mihn, at 12.5% 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 Carmen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Carmen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Carmen, 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 M AH0 N) 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