girls:
245k births since 1880
#164 (97th percentile)
boys:
309 births since 1891
#4277 (7th percentile)
overall:
245.3k births since 1880
#324 (96th percentile)
The name Caroline is the #324 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 245,308 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #164 (97.1% percentile) for all time with 244,999 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,277 (6.7% percentile) for all time with 309 births since 1891.
Caroline has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1891 for boys).
The name Caroline has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.9% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Caroline reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 94.4% percentile (ranked #54) with 2,272 births per million. The name was most common in 1881, with 3,197 births per million (ranked 67.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2018, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Caroline ranks #81 for girls (91.5% percentile) with 1,634 births per million, which is 51.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Caroline reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 3.8% percentile (ranked #728) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1891, with 46 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2014.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Caroline".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Carolyn. View all variations of Carolyn.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Caroline", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 40 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Carolyn" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Carolyn..
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Caroline. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 21.1% confident that Caroline is pronounced as KA-ruh-lain, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KA-ruh-LAIN, at 21.1% confidence, with 3 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 Caroline? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Caroline. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Caroline, 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 AE1 R AH0 L AY0 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.
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