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Kareema vs Karina

American parents have registered 61,717 Karinas since 1880, against 792 Kareemas. Karina is still ahead, with 363 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Kareema against Karina, 1880 to 2025 0 800 1.6k 2.4k 3.2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Kareema Karina

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Karina has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1956 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1975, when Kareema had 18 and Karina had 276.

Side by side

  Kareema Karina
Total US births 79261,717
Most in one year 343,001
Babies in 2025 5363
Estimated living today 77061,000
Median age today 3327
Peak year 19841995
Best rank 2,677th girls109th girls
Rank in 2025 14,942nd749th
First recorded 19721956
Girls / boys 792 / 061,464 / 253

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Kareemas alive today are over 33; half the Karinas are over 27. That is 6 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

How much commoner the name is in that state than it is nationally, from births recorded since 1910.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Kareema Karina
England and Wales 1062,048

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

Social Security Administration birth records, 1880–2025, public domain. Full histories: Kareema and Karina.