girls:
987.6k births since 1881
#15 (100th percentile)
boys:
2.8k births since 1935
#2387 (48th percentile)
overall:
990.4k births since 1881
#43 (99th percentile)
The name Karen is the #43 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 990,396 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 99.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #15 (99.8% percentile) for all time with 987,611 births since 1881. For boys, it ranks #2,387 (47.9% percentile) for all time with 2,785 births since 1935.
Karen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (1881 for girls and 1935 for boys). Birth data for Karen is available in 138 out of the 143 years between 1881 and 2023 (138 years for girls and 82 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 Karen has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Karen reached its peak popularity in 1965, achieving the 99.7% percentile (ranked #3) with 17,985 births per million. The name was most common in 1956, with 19,447 births per million (ranked 99.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2003, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Karen ranks #728 for girls (23.2% percentile) with 128 births per million, which is 0.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Karen reached its peak popularity in 1964, achieving the 13.0% percentile (ranked #575) with 45 births per million. The name was most common in 1942, with 46 births per million (ranked 10.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Karen ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 5.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Karen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Karen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Karen", 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 Karen.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Karen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 71.2% confident that Karen is pronounced as KEH-ruhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KA-ruhn, at 28.8% 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 Karen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Karen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Karen, 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 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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