girls:
915 births since 1915
#4801 (16th percentile)
boys:
100.6k births since 1880
#306 (93rd percentile)
overall:
101.5k births since 1880
#672 (91st percentile)
The name Karl is the #672 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 101,541 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 91.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #306 (93.3% percentile) for all time with 100,626 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,801 (16.0% percentile) for all time with 915 births since 1915.
Karl has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1915 for girls).
The name Karl has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.1% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Karl reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 79.8% percentile (ranked #135) with 1,180 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 1,217 births per million (ranked 79.1% percentile). Despite a low point around 2014, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Karl ranks #816 for boys (10.4% percentile) with 55 births per million, which is 4.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Karl reached its peak popularity in 1969, achieving the 4.2% percentile (ranked #731) with 21 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 21 births per million (ranked 4.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Karl".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Carl. View all variations of Carl.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Karl", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 3 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Carl" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Carl..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Karl. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.9% confident that Karl is pronounced as kahrl, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KAH-ruhl, at 9.1% 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 Karl? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Karl. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Karl, 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 AA1 R L) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker