girls:
101.2k births since 1896
#364 (94th percentile)
boys:
282 births since 1915
#4304 (6th percentile)
overall:
101.5k births since 1896
#673 (91st percentile)
The name Kara is the #673 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 101,527 recorded births since 1896. This represents the 91.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #364 (93.6% percentile) for all time with 101,245 births since 1896. For boys, it ranks #4,304 (6.1% percentile) for all time with 282 births since 1915.
Kara first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1896 (1896 for girls and 1915 for boys). Birth data for Kara is available in 97 out of the 128 years between 1896 and 2023 (95 years for girls and 32 years for boys). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Kara has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Kara reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 88.5% percentile (ranked #94) with 1,580 births per million. The name was most common in 1991, with 1,613 births per million (ranked 87.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Kara ranks #676 for girls (28.6% percentile) with 161 births per million, which is 10.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Kara reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 1.9% percentile (ranked #743) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 1983, with 9 births per million (ranked 1.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2004.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kara".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kara.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kara", 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 Kara.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Kara. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 36.5% confident that Kara is pronounced as KEH-ruh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KA-ruh, at 33.3% 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 Kara? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kara. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kara, 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) 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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