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Kari vs Karthik

American parents have registered 60,627 Karis since 1880, against 1,495 Karthiks. Kari is still ahead, with 113 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Kari against Karthik, 1880 to 2025 0 600 1.2k 1.8k 2.4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Kari Karthik

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

Kari has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1934 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2010, when Kari had 119 and Karthik had 79.

Side by side

  Kari Karthik
Total US births 60,6271,495
Most in one year 2,24379
Babies in 2025 11320
Estimated living today 57,0001,500
Median age today 4616
Peak year 19752010
Best rank 129th girls1,834th boys
Rank in 2025 2,076th4,857th
First recorded 19341977
Girls / boys 59,696 / 9310 / 1,495

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 Karis alive today are over 46; half the Karthiks are over 16. That is 30 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 Kari Karthik
England and Wales 101111

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: Kari and Karthik.