The short name Kara has two different origins and meanings. Firstly, it is a Turkish name meaning ‘dark, black’. Secondly, it can be a variant of the Italian name Cara which means ‘beloved, precious’ and derived from the Latin word ‘cara’.
Kara is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Kara 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 girls names, Kara ranks 481. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Kara. In the entire USA, approximately 98,576 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Kara. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
The short name Kara has two different origins and meanings. Firstly, it is a Turkish name meaning ‘dark, black’. Secondly, it can be a variant of the Italian name Cara which means ‘beloved, precious’ and derived from the Latin word ‘cara’.
Kara was especially... popular in the U.S. during the 1970s and the 1980s.
This was a real surprise! Kara is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #92 in the year 1988, when 3,045 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Kara much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kara was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Kara ranked 796 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 316 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Kara will remain a universally popular name.
Everyone knows her, everyone loves her and still she’s different from the mainstream: Kara occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Kara is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Kara is not one of those names that one encounters in every neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, is noticeable and special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 98,569 women and girls of all generations bear the name Kara – that is one in 1,564. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Idaho, where one in 874 women and girls is called Kara, while it is particularly rare in Mississippi, where you have to ask an average of 3,572 women for their name to get Kara as an answer once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter K is a real popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 7.5% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A, S and M are more common for girls' names.
With four letters, the name Kara 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.
That means that if 7.5% of all girls' names start with a K, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the girls' names that begin with a K, Karen is the most common.
If your name is Kara 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 Kara, you can simply say:
Koala
Apple
Rocket
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kara
Kara
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
A
R
A
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.
K
A
R
A
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. Kara sounds like this:
