girls:
5.3k births since 1882
#2307 (60th percentile)
boys:
24.4k births since 1880
#734 (84th percentile)
overall:
29.8k births since 1880
#1478 (81st percentile)
The name Cary is the #1,478 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 29,757 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 80.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 80.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #734 (84.0% percentile) for all time with 24,439 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,307 (59.6% percentile) for all time with 5,318 births since 1882.
Cary has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1882 for girls).
The name Cary has been given predominantly to boys, with 82.1% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Cary were boys.
For boys, Cary reached its peak popularity in 1957, achieving the 60.6% percentile (ranked #260) with 360 births per million. The name was most common in 1966, with 420 births per million (ranked 59.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Cary ranks #893 for boys (2.0% percentile) with 13 births per million, which is 3.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Cary reached its peak popularity in 1975, achieving the 26.2% percentile (ranked #556) with 131 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 131 births per million (ranked 26.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2018.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cary".
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 "Cary", 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 2 different pronunciations for the name Cary. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 77.8% confident that Cary is pronounced as KEH-ree, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KAH-ree, at 22.2% 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 Cary? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cary. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cary, 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.
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