girls:
5.9k births since 1912
#2160 (62nd percentile)
overall:
5.9k births since 1912
#3525 (54th percentile)
The name Karolyn is the #3,525 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 5,917 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 54.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 54.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #2,160 (62.2% percentile) for all time with 5,917 births since 1912.
Karolyn first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (first recorded for girls in 1912). Birth data for Karolyn is available in 111 out of the 112 years between 1912 and 2023. 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.
For girls, Karolyn reached its peak popularity in 1946, achieving the 24.5% percentile (ranked #498) with 104 births per million. The name was most common in 1941, with 120 births per million (ranked 23.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2018, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Karolyn ranks #937 for girls (1.1% percentile) with 9 births per million, which is 7.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Karolyn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Carolyn. View all variations of Carolyn.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Karolyn", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 40 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Carolyn" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Carolyn..
Our model has identified 9 different pronunciations for the name Karolyn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 34.1% confident that Karolyn is pronounced as KA-ruh-lihn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KEH-ruh-lihn, at 29.5% 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 Karolyn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Karolyn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Karolyn, 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 AE1 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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