The name Carl is of Germanic origin and means ‘free man’. The English and French variant of this name is Charles. Many Germanic and Scandianavian kings bore the name Carl or a variant of it.
Carl is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Carl isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Carl ranks 643. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Carl. In total, there are currently 477,183 people – children, adults and seniors – named Carl living in the United States, which is approximately 0.14 % of the entire population.
The name Carl is of Germanic origin and means ‘free man’. The English and French variant of this name is Charles. Many Germanic and Scandianavian kings bore the name Carl or a variant of it.
Carl is traditionally... common in northern Germany and Scandinavia, while Karl is more common in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Carl is the epitome of endurance. Every year since first names have been registered in the United States, parents have come up with the idea of naming their son Carl. This means that several boys named Carl have witnessed historic events such as the first Nobel Prize ceremony, the moon landing, the release of the first cell phone, or the turn of the millennium. The first name Carl has reached its highest rank of 21 numerous times, but that was long ago before the beginning of the last century, last time in 1895. Nevertheless, the name has been in the top 100 repeatedly. This makes Carl one of the most popular names of all time.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Carl was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Carl is one of them. However, Carl is not equally widespread in all states, but people in West Virginia seem to particularly fancy this name – the 10,033 men called Carl who live here are 0,655% of all male residents and push their name up to #29 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in West Virginia. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 477,183 people with the name Carl. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Carl on position 64 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter C is a frequent initial letter for boys’ names. This is because 5.2% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D.
With four letters, the name Carl is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
With 5.2% of all boys' names that begin with a C, this first letter is thus much more common than the average of all letters. And which boys’ name beginning with C do you think is the most common in the US? The answer is... Charles.
If your name is Carl and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Carl, you can simply say:
Cat
Apple
Rocket
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Carl
Carl
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
C
A
R
L
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
C
A
R
L
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Carl sounds like this:
