girls:
556.4k births since 1880
#53 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.6k births since 1915
#3062 (33rd percentile)
overall:
558k births since 1880
#113 (99th percentile)
The name Carolyn is the #113 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 557,999 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #53 (99.1% percentile) for all time with 556,379 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,062 (33.2% percentile) for all time with 1,620 births since 1915.
Carolyn has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1915 for boys).
The name Carolyn has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Carolyn reached its peak popularity in 1942, achieving the 98.5% percentile (ranked #10) with 14,367 births per million. The name was most common in 1942, with 14,367 births per million (ranked 98.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1945, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Carolyn ranks #728 for girls (23.2% percentile) with 128 births per million, which is 0.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Carolyn reached its peak popularity in 1943, achieving the 12.5% percentile (ranked #498) with 52 births per million. The name was most common in 1943, with 52 births per million (ranked 12.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1995.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Carolyn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Carolyn.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Carolyn", 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 Carolyn.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Carolyn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 43.2% confident that Carolyn is pronounced as KEH-ruh-lihn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KA-ruh-lihn, at 31.8% 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 Carolyn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Carolyn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Carolyn, 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 AH0 L IH0 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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