Caroline

199,035 people in America carry this name — ranked #279 of 923.

A name that has never gone out of use.

Say it KEH ruh lyn

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

K EH1 R AH0 L AY2 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 199,035 2020 Census
  • Rank #279 Common
  • Per 100,000 65.9 about 1 in 1,665 people
  • As a surname 401 ranked #55,282 the other way round

Where Caroline comes from and what it means

Teutonic in origin, reading literally as “man”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

Caroline name popularity by year

236,167 babies were given this name since 1880. The busiest year was 2000, with 5,028 of them.

80 90 00 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 00s 10 20

Most people carrying it were born in the 2000s.

Counted from Social Security card applications, so it covers births registered in the United States and leaves out names given to fewer than five babies in a year.

Middle names that fit Caroline

Three syllables already, so a short middle name keeps the whole from running long.

Better avoided

  • Caroline Nancy — runs together
  • Caroline Nicole — runs together
  • Caroline Emma — runs together

Chosen by sound from the pronouncing dictionary, then ordered by how often the name is given. None of it is a rule — the ear decides.

Never out of use

Caroline has been given in every decade on record — no fashion lifted it and none has dropped it.

Boys or girls: who is called Caroline?

0.1% men
198,800 women

As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.

Names built the same way as Caroline

Nothing else in the file ends on the same sound — a rare thing, and useful if you want a first name nobody will echo.

Same rhythm — 3 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

The most common full names

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Who has this name today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 81.2%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 4.0%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 7.5%
  • Two or more races — 2.9%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 4.0%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

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Where this page gets its numbers

  • Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
  • Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
  • Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers
Other names of Teutonic origin