Kara

surname · Turkish · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Kara is a surname, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. It appears chiefly in Turkish and Kurdish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Name used for ethnic groups in East/Central Africa and a Togo river; also Latin Cara 'dear'.

rarermore common
  • IEIreland1 in 1.5K◐
  • USUnited States1 in 3.6K
  • ATAustria1 in 4.3K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈95K ●

across 9 countries

4 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
489 ●

1.2M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 1.1K ◐

Iceland

Spellings & scripts●

CaraLatin · English●481K records
КараCyrillic · Mongolian●3 records
ԿառաArmenian · Armenian●1 records
카라Hangul · Korean●0 records

Locally spelled Cara in US United States, GB United Kingdom, AU Australia and 11 more.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

Name used for ethnic groups in East/Central Africa and a Togo river; also Latin Cara 'dear'.

Sources 1

  • African Names

Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Kara is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#77393,261976K rec.1 in 3.6K93KCara489
GB United Kingdom#58134,51450K rec.—52Cara183
AU Australia#63221,31939K rec.—62Cara172
DE Germany—17,73620K rec.——Kara136
IN India—14,45615K rec.—2.7KCara56
CA Canada#75212,03622K rec.—6Cara171
TR Türkiye—11,45312K rec.—290KKara78
IE Ireland#1936,1062K rec.—176Cara74
BE Belgium—3,4731.6K rec.—1.3KKara40
PH Philippines—2,3475.1K rec.——Cara68
NL Netherlands—2,2481.9K rec.—120Kara55
AT Austria—2,0851.4K rec.—215Kara40

Roughly 93K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 3.6K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • Turkish739K60%
  • Kurdish290K24%
  • Hindi49K4%
  • English29K2%
  • German19K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Turkish738,54160%
Kurdish290,02424%
Hindi48,9914%
English29,1302%
German19,4092%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Kara is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Turkish surname770K records spelled Kara6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye, United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom

    Languages: Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani

    Also written Кара, K'Ara, Ķärä

  • a separate surname46K records spelled Kara10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, Türkiye, Pakistan

    Also written Kára, Ḳarā, Karâ, Karā, Kará

  • Arabic surname43K records spelled Kara9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye, Syria, Algeria, United States

    Also written Kârã, Kãra, Kãrä, Kâra, Kârâ

  • Spanish surname42K records spelled Kara8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye, India, United States, Spain

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written K'Ara, Karà, Kãra, Kàra

  • French surname30K records spelled Kara2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Türkiye, Belgium, United States

    Also written K'Ara

  • Indonesian surname8.9K records spelled Kara4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Türkiye, Indonesia, United States

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Kãrä, Kärā

84 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Kara is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Irish/Gaelic: the vigilant one; one who shares or distributes

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • metonymic occupational name for a carter, from kdra ‘hand cart’.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • from a pet form of a personal name: Czech Karel, Slovak Karol, Hungarian Kdroly, vernacular forms of Carolus (see Charles).

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Turkish, black, dark

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Turkish, 1. En koyu renk, siyah. 2. Zenci, esmer.

    as a wordTDK Kişi Adları Sözlüğü (official Turkish given-name dictionary)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time●

01K2K3K4K1900195020003.3K · 1991

Show as table
Kara in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1896–2025
Yearrecords
18965
19156
19166
19197
19315
19326
19338
19346
19358
19367
193715
193813
193913
194012
194117
194224
194317
194420
194519
194625
194739
194826
194922
195032
195140
195240
195354
195453
195583
1956116
195792
1958122
1959111
1960135
1961319
1962516
1963817
1964663
1965798
1966580
1967949
1968908
19691,354
19701,503
19711,469
19721,454
19731,630
19742,304
19752,358
19762,037
19772,415
19782,290
19792,300
19802,445
19812,439
19822,661
19832,714
19842,855
19852,811
19862,722
19872,699
19883,039
19893,121
19903,036
19913,281
19922,931
19932,527
19942,376
19952,148
19961,909
19971,907
19981,711
19991,688
20001,649
20011,476
20021,403
20031,356
20041,285
20051,230
20061,192
20071,171
20081,338
20091,391
20101,113
2011938
2012860
2013834
2014731
2015624
2016626
2017610
2018621
2019530
2020427
2021373
2022319
2023283
2024261
2025226

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 99 years between 1896–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

100012001400160018002000Simeon Kara, b. 1000Joseph Kara, b. 1065James Carroll, b. 1857György Kara, b. 1935Rasim Kara, b. 1950Ayoob Kara, b. 1955Senan Kara, b. 1978Burcu Kara, b. 1980Anksa Kara, b. 1985Jasmine Kara, b. 1988

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence●

Attested in 98 sources across 47 countries.

Official registers attesting Kara
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
TR TürkiyeTÜİK NIP — most used surnames2025290K#16
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202093K#571
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls—2.7K#2,478
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.5K#17,842
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020101.3K#20,322
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)—1.3K#937
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020001.1K#22,461
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)2024827#1,462
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)2008825#1,692
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—634#5,590
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—630#670
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)2024580#1,385

Reference works 7

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 786 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Kara?
We estimate roughly 95 thousand people bear Kara (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Kara have the most bearers?
We estimate about 93 thousand people bear Kara in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled cara.
Where is Kara most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kara is densest in Iceland — about 1 in 1.1 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is Kara compared with other names?
In the United States, Kara is the 773rd most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
What does the name Kara mean?
Recorded meaning: Name used for ethnic groups in East/Central Africa and a Togo river; also Latin Cara 'dear'.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kara

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Kara” — the 773rd most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Kara parses inside a full name →